


ghost story

by wreckageofstars



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drama, Family, Gen, Halloween, Hurt/Comfort, Psychological Horror, The Time War, it's OCTOBER it's time for SPOOK, post-Resolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2020-11-15 10:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20864798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wreckageofstars/pseuds/wreckageofstars
Summary: She's always been terribly good at haunting herself.





	1. 1.

The TARDIS door creaks as it opens.

There’s not even a second to cushion it. She steps out and into chaos. All around them, the universe is being quietly flayed alive. Reality is bending over itself, and once—

Well. Once, she had been used to it. 

It’s not the TARDIS’ fault. That’s her first thought, her only thought for five gut-wrenching seconds as she stands there frozen, as her friends pile out of the doors behind her, expecting an adventure. The TARDIS always takes her where she needs to go.

“Cocktails on the moon, she says,” Graham mutters behind her, but it barely registers. “Well, this sure as hell ain’t the moon, and I sure as hell don’t see any cocktails, Doc.”

She shudders out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. The ship’s internal gravity is stable for now, but she can hear the engine wailing, feel the groan of it beneath her feet. A cacophony of alarms scream in the distance, distorted by the ship’s failing systems. The rest is creaking, aching silence. Familiar. 

Dread without a name settles fitful in her gut.

“Where are we?” Yaz asks, gently concerned, boots clanging on the metal floor, painfully unaware of the danger they’re all in. She reaches a careful hand to examine a hanging cable, draws it back as it sparks. “Bit of a rough landing. Definitely not the moon, then?”

“No,” she answers, stepping forward. Her knees don’t shake. Her boots clatter tinnily against the floor. “We’re on a ship. It’s crashing.”

“What,” Graham says flatly, edged with nervousness, cocktails on the moon forgotten. She can hear him shuffling closer behind her, fabric rustling as he places his hands in the pockets of his coat. “Doc, you don’t mean—”

“Abandoned,” she says, fluttering her fingers at him absently, crouching to place her palm on the floor. The vibrations travel up her arm, disjointed, wheezy. Engine failure, she diagnoses at a distance. A slow plunge. They’ve got time. “And crashing. The fleet won’t care, they’ll have cut their losses already. Don’t worry.”

He shifts, still nervous. “That don’t really sound like nothing to worry about, Doc. Why are we here?”

“Good question,” she breathes, still crouched near the ground. She takes the sonic from her pocket with a trembling hand. Her fingers have gone numb. Panic burns slow in this body, fizzling until it can’t be contained any longer. She can feel it bubbling in the pit of her stomach. “But there’s an even better one.”

“How are we here?” Ryan ventures, following Yaz’s ill-advised path towards the sparking cable. “When you were aiming for the moon.” He ducks around it, frowning in the corner of her eye. “I’m with Graham, though. Don’t love the sound of crashing.” He pauses. The frown stays. “How’d’you mean, fleet?”

“Gold star,” she mutters, scanning the room as she stands, noting where they are with instincts that she hates. They’ve landed in a glorified storage cupboard. Everything is chrome and cramped and not especially clean, but that’s just like a Dalek, really. The wall panels have been torn open, wires exposed and raw, oozing with substances that they’re probably better off avoiding. The internal weapons system running throughout the ship has been—

Dismantled. Dismantled, she realizes as she stands abruptly, and cannibalized.

“Don’t worry,” she says, feeling cold. Suspicion solidifies in her gut like concrete, as her fingers brush over a fizzling electrical display. The temporal co-ordinates it spits out at her careful touch send the panic in her stomach shooting up her throat. The sonic writes the rest of it in stone. “We aren’t staying long. This isn’t—” 

Time wrenches and starts like a water-logged motor, oh, and sometimes she hates being right. This is the fourth dimension, rotted and pulled apart and perverted. The is time and space at a push and tilt—

This is the Time War, and it shouldn’t be possible. 

Her fingers twitch, grasping absently for a comforting hand that never comes. 

She’d forgotten, a bit. She’d let herself forget. Gallifrey may be tucked away safe in a corner of the universe, but the war—

The war she’d left behind, still locked in on itself, never-ending, never-starting. Right behind her eyes, and right in front of them too, and the smell of it is visceral and familiar like yesterday. There’s smoke up her nose and phantom sirens in her ears and the TARDIS always brings her where she needs to go, and from that awful, simple, terrible fact there’s enough to put the rest of the pieces together, at least in part. 

There are weapons here, in this echo of hell, and someone has finally been stupid enough to try to scavenge them.

She realizes with a frightening clarity that she has no idea what she’s going to do next. 

“Behind,” she whispers, perfectly calm. “Get behind me.”

Is it anger, the cold in her gut? She’s been angry before. At Tim Shaw, at King James and all those senseless deaths, at the—at the Dalek, but that had been different, hadn’t it. That had been cold and deep, just like this, and it hadn’t been simple or shallow or sensible. 

It’s never been a sensible kind of anger.

She stalks forward, out of the storage cupboard, away from the TARDIS, ears ringing. Her friends are behind, or at least they’d better be, feet clanging against the metal. She can taste the burnt-out engine at the back of her mouth, feel reality bend like it shouldn’t but so often had. The time lock, picked out of shape. Time itself, warped and bent at the mercy of those who should have known better. She’d forgotten, oh, she’d forgotten—

“Doctor.” Yaz is at her shoulder, keeping pace. “What’s going on?”

The sonic is a cold comfort in her hand as she reels down the corridor, intent. Calm. She has no idea what she’s going to do, but the same idea starts and ends with finding whoever’s responsible for this. Making them stop, making them—

“It’s just—”

Yaz’s voice is uncertain enough to halt her in her tracks. She turns, barely seeing what’s behind her. Her friends, terribly afraid and drenched in red.

“—you’re shaking,” Yaz says, glancing nervously down at her trembling fingers. 

Clara would have grabbed her hand. Yaz doesn’t. Her fingers flex briefly into a fist. She whitens the knuckles of her other hand around the sonic. She should say something comforting. Something funny. Something kind.

She can’t.

How naive, to think the Dalek might have been the end of it all. To think she could just carry on, forgetting.

“Go back to the TARDIS,” she says, deciding. Her own voice sounds tinny in her ears. She should leave, too. She should march them all right back around, back into the TARDIS, stick her fingers in her ears and pretend, but—but— “Back inside, all of you.”

She’s dreaming. This is a nightmare. A nightmare she can taste at the back of her throat, too familiar, too mundanely horrible to be anything but real.

(Outside, she thinks absently, there will be whole worlds on fire. Outside, she’ll be out there somewhere, nameless and terrible, always moving towards something unspeakable, trapped in perpetual motion.)

She’s not dreaming. 

It’s still a nightmare. She’s brought her friends to the doorstep of hell, and they won’t even be able to recognize it. She’s told them nothing. She’ll tell them nothing. None of this is who she is, anymore, and besides—

Hell is no place for friends. 

“Not without you,” Yaz says, predictably. 

“Back inside, or I can’t let you travel with me.” The words are a bit too sharp in her throat. A bit too unexpected. Yaz balks. Red warning light coats her hair, her face, her leather jacket. 

“Doctor,” she protests, and it’s too much to hope for, isn’t it, that they’ll listen to her for once. ‘We’re with you’ had been a promise, and it’s never sat heavier in her gut, but she has no time to argue, no time to worry. It’s not just the future at stake but the past as well. All of reality might be hanging by a thread. The lie she’s built is crumbling at her feet. She’s so angry she can feel it in her teeth, but she can’t let them see.

“You’re not serious,” Yaz presses, when she doesn’t elaborate. “Doctor, where are we?”

“Back inside,” she orders quietly, but she makes the mistake of looking into those eyes, big and brown and far too convincing. “Go on, do as you’re told.”

“There’s alarms, there’s something wrong here,” Yaz says, brows drawing to a frustrated close. “Aren’t we meant to help?” 

She can’t help the sneer that catches the edges of her mouth, but she buries it quickly.

“There’s nothing here worth helping. Trust me. This is an accident, this is—” Her breath catches. “I need to figure out what’s going on, and you all need to go back and wait.”

“I don’t think that’s how this works,” Yaz says, stepping closer, brows still knit together. Pressing, always pressing. Never satisfied. She takes a shallow breath. “You’re afraid.”

“Very.” Red pulses behind her eyes. Fear is just a shorthand, sometimes, for things that are far stronger. Far worse. “You know what that makes me? Smart.”

“I didn’t come all this way to be left in the car.” Yaz glances over her shoulder at Ryan, still parked behind her like someone who actually bothers to listen. She adds ten points to the scoreboard in her mind. “Neither did you.”

“Look, mate, if the Doctor thinks it’s worth running from,” Ryan says, trailing off into a shrug. “But you shouldn’t go alone.” His shoulders settle into a more determined shape.“If we go back, we all go together.”

Beside him, Graham is watching her carefully, seeing more than he’ll ever admit to. 

“What’s this about, Doc?” he ventures. Red throws half his face into worried, wrinkled shadow. “Really, I mean. Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” she whispers.

“Right,” Ryan says skeptically. 

“I’m serious. This ship is time-locked,” she says, feeling numb. “These events, they’re time-locked. Nothing in, nothing out. But nearby, there’s a black hole swallowing a neutron star, and the ripples in space-time have torn a hole, drawn the TARDIS in. That’s how we got through.” Her voice steadies. Her teeth throb. “That’s how whoever got here before us came through.”

“Someone else is here,” Yaz says, straightening. Her eyes flick past the Doctor’s shoulder, watching. On alert. “Someone who shouldn’t be?”

“No one should be here.” She can feel her pulses throbbing in her neck. “But it’s not so much,” she says mildly, “the fact that we got in that worries me. It’s what might follow us out.” 

“Doc,” Graham starts.

“You don’t go alone,” Yaz insists, eyes narrowed.

_Oh, yes I do_, she almost snaps. But it’s almost a lie. She’s not that man anymore. She _can’t_ be that man anymore. She’s not a lonely god, she’s just a traveller. A traveller and her best mates, larking about the universe, helping where they can. Her friends—well, who would she be, without them?

She doesn’t know, yet, who she is in the dark. She’s not sure today is the day she wants to find out. 

“Behind me,” is all she can whisper, striding ahead, vision tunnelling. “If you’re going to come, I suppose I can’t stop you, but you stay behind me or you go back to the TARDIS.”

Their protests meld into the cacophony of background noise as she reels onward, ears still ringing. Hands cold. The tip of her nose is a numb, unknowable thing. The walls of the Dalek ship are familiar a thousand times over, the layout still ingrained in the tactical part of her brain, sleeping. Sleeping, like everything else had been, before.

She can put it to rest again. She’s done it before, on Skaro, at New Years. Shoved it all behind a cheeky grin and a quick diversion and a clever quip. She’s not a lonely god, anymore. She’s just a traveller. A traveller and her best mates, exploring the universe, never straying far from the light. This part of her life is over, and if she has to beat it back into the broom closet herself, then that’s what she’ll do. 

But even hell, she supposes tiredly, ought to have a custodian. 

She follows the map in her mind, the readings from the sonic, down, down, into the tactical bay, barely registering the bang and rattle of her friends clambering down behind her. Ten more points to Ryan, she thinks absently, when they all make it down without incident. Any complaints he keeps to himself. The lifts are all dead, and their journey is precarious enough that normally she’d be worried, but the thought is only a muffled thing. Everything else drowns it out. 

She collects more evidence as she stalks towards the life signs in the tactical bay. It’s a mournful noise, the death rattle of a dying ship. This close to the failing engine, steam whistling in the distance, heat stinging her face, the groan of it becomes something alive.

Everything salvageable has been scavenged. The walls as they pass are almost obscene. Ripped apart, torn open, their insides exposed, panels hanging and discarded. Ooze seeping and dripping down the metal seams, pulsing between naked wires.

“Oh my god,” Yaz whispers behind her, quietly horrified, as the full scope of the carnage becomes apparent.

Liquified Dalek always did have a distinct tang to it and half-remembered bile rises up her throat as the smell hits her nose. This close to the weapons, time grows thick and heady. Vile. The back of her neck prickles. 

“Oi!” she shouts in warning as they approach.

She still has no idea what she’s going to do, but the sonic whirrs comfortingly in her trembling hand as she forces the bay doors to open, striding forward. Two life signs. One ship, docked. 

One ship, docked by professional scavengers in a bay full of temporal weapons, and so the blast, when it hits, is more of a surprise than it probably should have been. She hears it before she sees it, and once it hits, feels it before she hears it. It’s enough to pinch a bit of time between two fingers, take what’s been made into rubber and stretch it, dive behind her and push her friends out of the way. 

She realizes, a second before and a second too late, that it won’t quite be enough. 

The blast scrapes across her ribs and impacts against the metal behind them, the edges of the bay doors. The ceiling wrenches and groans and gives up against the forces of heat and gravity and time, plunging to the ground with a squeal of wrenching metal and pneumatic hissing. Never existing and yet very much existing, a scalding, deadly paradox—

Crashing down on her friends. No. Her vision clears in a fit and start, as she stumbles to her feet, time-sick, side burning. Crashed down on her friends. Half-formed metal scalds her palms as she wrenches it aside, nausea burning in her throat, beyond anything that might reasonably be called fear, that might reasonably be called anger.

There’s only her numb fingers and a Dalek ship and time cracked and broken behind her. She knows what to do. 

Yaz’s fingers find her first, grasping between metal and broken tubes. She pulls her up, shaken but unharmed.

“Doctor,” she gasps, eyes wide.

“It’s alright,” she lies kindly through her teeth, maneuvering them both around the debris, before she turns back to the wreckage. There’s smoke up her nose, time all twisted in her stomach, but her vision is still tunnelled and one second at a time is all that matters. She wrenches away a panel as large as her torso. Underneath it Graham is cowering, soot-covered, crouched down protectively—

His eyes are glassy with shock. 

She doesn’t try to touch him, doesn’t try to move him out of the way. She crouches down beside him and reaches around carefully. Finding Ryan’s pulse. 

His skin is warm under her hand. He’s alive. For now.

“Don’t move him,” she says quietly, eyes skimming over the damage, cataloguing it for later, all that red and metal and cotton, the terrible iron smell of it, the jagged rawness of a fraying timeline. She catalogues it all but doesn’t look at it yet. Instead she thinks very hard about the metal, sharp and warped and hot in her hands, as she clears space in the soot and the smoke. “Don’t move, any of you. Stay right here.”

“Doctor,” Yaz says in a smoke-clogged whisper. White ash is gathered in the remnants of her braid, on the top of her head, like snow. Caught between her eyelashes. “We’ve got to—I’ve got first aid, but we have to go.” Her voice cracks. The rest of her is calm and still. “We have to go.”

“Stay here,” she says quietly. “Don’t move.”

Her head shakes wordlessly, betrayal sitting quick behind her eyes, but there’s no—

She swallows back a laugh, fizzling with a cocktail of panic and regret, turning. 

There’s no time.

Smoke hangs heavy in the air. Time, too, though no one else will be able to feel it. In the back of her mouth, it tastes like ozone, like particles caught forever in quantum entanglement. Wrong, in ways that she’ll never be able to describe. She stumbles forward a step out of the smoke, like some sort of deranged silhouette.

Hell’s custodian, cleaning up.

“Sorry,” she says, more affably than she feels, taking in the hitch and click of a time disruptor being reloaded with a tired, familiar sort of fear. “But who exactly do you think you’re dealing with here?”

Two figures become sharper as her eyes focus, as some of the smoke clears from the air. Automatic vents. Possibly the last thing on the ship that still works, that hasn’t been scavenged apart. She stares down one tall figure and one short, with eight ears between them. Nautolans. Related. Both have the same splotch of greenish birthmark snaking down over one eye, across the gills in their necks. 

“You’re not a Dalek,” the shorter one says, trembling. “This sector of space was evacuated yesterday, we checked the logs. What—”

“Smart boy,” she says, flat. “Biology. Count the hearts.”

The taller one blanches with fear. She tries not to enjoy it.

“Followed you through,” she says, pleasantly. “Lovely little trail you left through that hole in the universe.”

“No,” he whispers. “That’s impossible.”

Nautolans are superstitious, she remembers suddenly. One of the most superstitious races in the entire galaxy, up to their four ears in stories and legends. A grin spreads its way across her face, though it doesn’t reach her eyes. 

She’s not a lonely god anymore. But maybe a vengeful ghost will do.

“There are no more Time Lords,” he whispers, high-pitched and whistling. “You’re gone, you’re all dead—”

She scrunches her nose, feigning nonchalance. “I don’t feel very dead. Then again, Time Lords—” The smile she sends his way is still pleasant. “Very hard to kill. Would you step away from the gun, please?”

The taller one is clearly stupider than his friend. His webbed fingers only clutch to it harder, amphibious knuckles whitening around the trigger. She tuts quietly, striding forward, feeling Yaz clutch uselessly at her coat, whisper furiously at her back. The words don’t register. Her vision has narrowed to a tunnel. She can’t feel her fingers. 

“You haven’t loaded anything yet,” she remarks, taking in the piles of weapons, wires, metals. Enough temporal technology to outfit half an army. Knowledge that should have been lost with everything else. “You’re taking your time. That wasn’t very smart of you. Did you think you were alone out here?”

“No one was here,” the shorter one shudders out. “No one was meant to be here, there were no Daleks, no Time Lords, no temporal powers, this was all abandoned—”

“Until you two dropped in.” She stalks forward another step, ignoring the disruptor still trained on her. “Slipped in through a little hole in the time lock and thought you’d collect on the salvage of a lifetime. You must have been monitoring spacial-temporal anomalies for ages. Quite a bit of work, I bet.” She smiles again. “Shame you’re going to leave with nothing.”

“We’re not going to leave here empty-handed,” the taller one says, hefting his weapon.

“You shouldn’t be here at all,” she says softly. “You shouldn’t have come through the hole. You’ve put a crack in the wall of hell, and if it breaks, you’ll be worse than murderers. Not to mention, the weapons you’re trying to salvage could unravel the universe.” She comes to a halt a metre in front of them, unwavering. “They did unravel the universe,” she says. Beyond the scummed-up windows of the ship, she can feel it fraying, feel hell beating away at her mind. Familiar. Too close. “So put the gun down.”

He doesn’t move, though his brother—the smarter one, clearly, though that’s not saying much here—drops his smaller pistol to the ground with a clatter.

“Come on,” she says, half a snarl, half a whisper. “This ship is going to crash into the planet beneath you and kill us all before you can finish loading everything anyway. Drop your gun, get back in your space-hopper, and leave the way you came before I seal it up forever.”

“Come on, Tobias,” the smaller one whispers, two sets of ears twitching. He’s gone so pale she can see his veins through the skin of his face. His gills flare. “Do what she says.”

Tobias shakes his head, eyes glued to her, pupils blown wide. “The bounty,” he whispers. “We can’t, we can’t—”

“I am allowing you,” she enunciates, mild as a thin breeze, “to leave.”

The smaller one shudders. 

“Tobias,” he hisses. “Tobias.”

“We’re too close to the planet.” Tobias shuffles his weapon closer to his body, still eyeing her warily. “We need to use this ship’s time field to jump a few reels back, before we got sucked into the gravity well.”

“No.” Her voice sharpens, disaster scenarios unfolding in her mind’s eye. She can’t tell if they’re the work of her imagination or the future. “No time field, the lock can’t take any more distortion.” 

From behind her comes a terrible wheeze. A muffled groan on its heels, small and pained. 

“Doc,” Graham says, tinny in her ears. Desperate. She’s glad she can’t see his face, because it would be her undoing, she’s sure of it. “Doc, please.”

“I could take you somewhere safe myself,” she whispers thinly, ignoring the sound for now. “But funnily enough, I don’t have the time.”

“If we’re quick,” the smaller one murmurs, pitifully afraid. “If we’re quick we can make it, Tobias. Tobias, please.”

“We’ll be sucked down with the ship, we’ll be crushed to death,” Tobias spits, knuckles white. His fear has strengthened into the senseless fury of the truly stupid. “Pick up your pistol, brother. Do it!”

“Doc—” Graham pleads, half-sobbing.

“You should have thought of that before you came,” she says, skin prickling, time flaking off of her like dust. Behind her Ryan is dying, and in front of her the past is unraveling and maybe the future too, and her footprints in the sand have never been more visible. “Before you went digging where you shouldn’t, did you think I wouldn’t notice? Did you think you could pick apart a hole in the most dangerous wall in the universe and no one would come running? Did you think at all, or are you just too stupid to live?”

The brother flinches away from her into the wall, but Tobias holds fast, shuddering. 

“The war outside this window,” she whispers, “is a hell that stupid ants like you could never dream of, and you’ve almost broken open the only thing holding it back. And you’ve hurt my friends while you were at it. So get in your stupid little space-hopper and leave,” she says, bluffing, she’s always bluffing except for when she’s not, “because I’ll let us all crash and burn and die before I let you remove a single thing from this ship. Before I let the Time War seep back into the universe.”

Oh, but it’s a clarity of sorts, isn’t it. She thought she’d outgrown it, she thought she’d grown past it, but there’s something cold clanging about in the marrow of her bones, and it’s not a sensible anger at all.

Ryan’s breaths rattle in her ringing ears like a death knell, louder than a cloister bell. All other sound runs together like paint, the groan of the engine, the shrieking, sobbing breaths behind her. They’ve given up pleading with her. She’s tumbling from a pedestal even as she stands and breathes, but she hasn’t hit the ground yet.

“The question you’re looking for,” she breathes, because she needs them to leave, she needs the universe safe, she needs her footprints in the sand whipped away by the wind, she needs Ryan not to _die_, “is this one: who locked the Time War away in the first place? Who put an end to the war without?”

Of course, she had been the one to start it. She hasn’t remembered the feel of those thin wires between her fingers for years. One fist flexes at her side, numb. 

Impossible choices. Perpetual motion towards something unspeakable, that’s always been her life, hasn’t it? Even still.

“You can’t be here,” the brother sobs, pressed into the corner of the wall, “you can’t, oh Great Mother, we’re only dreaming, Tobias, please—”

Tobias shakes his head, face bloodless. The engine grates, far underneath them, gravity sucking it towards a fiery end, but he stumbles back a step and she knows now that she’s won. “You’re a myth,” he whispers. “You don’t exist, you’re a—a story they tell.”

_I’m no one_, she wants to say. _I’m a traveller, I’m a friend_.

“I’m the Doctor,” she tells him, dredging up a phrase and a smile that she’s long left in the dust, feeling something hot in the pit of her stomach as he trembles in front of her. The ends suit the means, she reminds herself. Or is it the means that suit the ends?

Oh well. She knows plenty about both.

“Basically,” she says, sour in her mouth, like pulling on an old suit, but the ends—_hah_—suit the means. “Run.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween! And by Halloween I obviously mean the entirety of October. 
> 
> I've convinced myself this is horror-y enough to count as a proper Halloween story, even if it maybe doesn't quite look like it yet, so bear with lmao. Five or so chapters, give or take some editing between now and the end, and I'm planning on posting every week of October until Halloween. Nothing especially new, thematically, but I'm desperate for new content and in the meantime I'm never quite finished with the Time War, so, y'know.
> 
> Special thanks to hetzi_clutch and hellynz for giving her the old one-two. I should also mention how much of a debt this concept owes to Hetzi's Sleep Paralysis (which you should go READ right NOW what are you waiting for oh my god) and Teyke's Time v.3.0, which both do wonderful, terrible things to the Time War.
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoy, and in the meantime I'd love to know what you thought!


	2. 2.

The TARDIS is _home solid safe_ under her feet as she staggers through her doors, Ryan cradled in her arms, numb in her hands. He’s not exactly a light passenger, unwieldy in her grip, but she’s locked herself out of the front of her head. She can’t feel anything. She might as well be lifting a feather.

There won’t be time to duck to the medical bay. Time, in fact, is still so thick in the air that she’s all but choking on it and Ryan’s life is slipping away as she stands and breathes, water spiralling down a sink. She could pinch the future again, twist it, repair it, but everything is so, so fragile. This close to the war, this close to the time lock, a warm breath could collapse it all in on itself and doom the universe a different way. She knows better now, maybe.

But she can still fix this. 

“Hold on,” she breathes into his ear as she reels away from him to her feet, stumbling to the console.

“Doctor,” she hears Yaz say sharply, closing the doors behind her. She’s out of breath, out of patience. Fear leaks through the fault lines in her voice. “He needs help,” she says, watery, “he needs—”

She lets her fingers fly across the console on autopilot, eyes glued to the reflections of her friends in the screen. Graham has stumbled wordlessly to one knee beside Ryan and she can’t see his face. Yaz lingers by the door, like she’s not sure whether the inside or the outside is the safer bet.

“I can help him,” the Doctor says confidently, locked outside of herself, a spectator. She watches herself numbly, still trapped between impossible choices, still trapped between the person she is and the person she’d like to be. “But I have to close the hole, or all hell might break loose.”

Graham looks up, a glassy mirage in the console screen. 

“I don’t care,” he rasps. “I don’t care about the hole, I don’t care—”

“I know,” she says simply, because she does. She doesn’t look up from the console. It should be simple enough, fixing it all. The TARDIS is meant to be good at this sort of thing, anyway, and if she can just remember the right button— “I know.”

“How would you know?” he spits at her back, and it’s a low blow that he’ll regret later, she reminds herself, before she can turn around. He’s only afraid. He’s only human. “You said your family are all gone.”

Her face scrunches into a scowl before she can stop it, but she’s kept her back to them, and so it stays a secret. She plunges a lever down. The TARDIS wheezes and groans in reply, straining to do as she’s told. The necessary calculations she performs in less than a second, mind spinning fast, time thick in her throat. One more lever and the TARDIS jolts as they take off, knitting the universe back together behind them as they spin off into safer waters. 

Nothing out, nothing in. A war for all eternity, sealed off again. If she takes a moment to think about it—

She doesn’t.

“There,” she whispers, taking a shuddering step back. The TARDIS hums gently. _Barn in the desert_ sits warmly at the back of her mind, like a reminder. A reassurance. _It’s still there. It’s not gone_. “All sealed up again.”

“And us?” Yaz ventures, not budging from the door. “Doctor—”

When she turns, those big brown eyes are full of fear.

For a moment, her fumbling, fizzing brain can only wonder at what exactly she’s afraid of, still, before the thought catches like razor wire.

_Afraid of me_, she thinks, and the notion sinks to the pit of her stomach.

“Doctor,” Yaz tries again, and she’s too brave, too well trained to waver, but her voice is watery still. “That ship—”

The fear in that gaze makes her nauseous with guilt, but it makes her unaccountably angry, too. Not at Yaz, not at anyone, really, just—angry. At the universe. At herself. 

“You don’t have to worry about it anymore.” 

Yaz shakes her head, undeterred. “All those things you were saying—”

“You don’t have to worry about that, either.” 

There’s no time for this, not right now. The lock has been sealed, they’re safe in the vortex, the war is behind them—

And she’s got bigger things to worry about, for the moment.

She swallows back the unwanted sharpness on her tongue and kneels beside Graham, his shaking hands white-knuckled in Ryan’s jacket. She removes them gently.

“It’s alright,” she says softly. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Doc,” he says, scared. The angry kind of scared. She can feel it in the air.

“Don’t worry,” she whispers, the grate of the floor digging into her knees. “I can fix it. See?”

Breath in, breath out, and if they’re afraid of her now, then she’s sure this won’t help, but it’s all she can think of to do. She exhales, gold trickling out into the air around them, hands tingling and warm with energy as she places them on Ryan’s chest. Beneath her hands it’s all cotton-metal-rust and she catalogues the feeling, the smell, the stumbling heartbeat—

—and then she fixes it. 

She has so many more lives this time around that it barely feels like a sacrifice.

Graham’s breath hitches in surprise, but he doesn’t stop her. Yaz steps forward, away from the door.

“What are you doing?” she demands. “Doctor, what—”

“—what are you doing?” the boy’s mother had begged him, covered in soot, her grimy hands wound in his jacket, and he had shaken her off without a thought, life trailing from his lips into the firelight, trying to fix something, trying to fix anything—

_People are so terribly fragile_, he had thought then, failing to start a heart that had stopped long ago, siphoning off pieces of his own life for nothing, for no-one, but that was rather the point of it all, rather the point of a war, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, the boy had died here and his mother would too and perhaps he would follow them over and over and again and again—

“Doctor.” Ryan’s voice is a terrible rasp. His eyes looking up at her are glassy with exhaustion, still gleaming faintly gold. “You can stop,” he breathes, patting her clumsily on the hand. _Alive_. “You can stop now.”

_Alive_.

She withdraws her hands numbly. Beside her, Graham is doing his very best not to cry, and it’s a choked and awful sound. 

“Hey, Gramps,” Ryan mutters, content and unmarred, and his eyes flutter closed.

“He’ll sleep,” she says quietly, as the last of the regeneration energy wisps away into the air. There’s cotton behind her eyelids. The TARDIS floor has never looked more appealing. Generally speaking, what she’s just done is a terrible idea, but as far as terrible ideas go, it’s hardly the worst she’s ever had. In fact, she thinks fuzzily, gazing down at Ryan’s sleeping but very-much-alive face, it’s probably the opposite. “For quite a while, probably, but don’t worry.”

The TARDIS dims with a sympathetic wheeze and she closes her eyes for just a moment._ Safe_. _Alive_. _Barn in the desert_.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Yaz whispers.

She doesn’t move. Her eyes stay closed. The grate is still digging in to her knees. “I can’t,” she says. “Or at least, not very often, not without consequences, so don’t go—”

She opens her eyes. She swallows the rest of the words back gingerly. There’s the thought, very loud and clanging around in the back of her head, that all of this is distinctly her fault.

“Don’t go getting into trouble,” she whispers anyway, struggling to her feet. The world blackens at the edges but she scowls the darkness away, digging her fingers roughly into the console for balance. All of it can wait.

“Trouble,” Graham breathes, swiping a hand down his face. He shakes his head, still gazing intently down at Ryan. “Doc. He weren’t to blame, and you know it.”

“I know.” She swallows. “I do.”

“Do you?”

“If you’d turned back when I asked—”

“Then there wouldn’t have been anyone to watch,” he interrupts, finally glancing up at her, shaken. “There wouldn’t have been anyone to save.”

He might be right, but it only adds fuel to the pit of fury roiling fruitless in her gut.

“I’m not a murderer, Graham,” she protests, swallowing it back.

His eyes are frigid. “No, you seem to have an awful lot of rules about that sort of thing. Only they look a bit flexible, from where I’m standing. At least when you’re the one breaking ‘em.”

“You don’t understand,” she allows, still reaching for mild and apologetic.

“So explain, then.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t.”

“No.” Her own voice is sharp in her throat now, against her will. The console is warm under her hands as she turns to plot in the coordinates for Sheffield. Home. They’ve had enough adventure for one day, she can’t help but think grimly. Maybe enough adventure for a lifetime, a much quieter, much crueller voice suggests. Maybe she’s shattered the mirror beyond repair. “I can’t.”

Graham exhales behind her, clearly dissatisfied. When he speaks his voice is still gravelly with fear.

“Where are we?” 

“The vortex.” She moves her hands across the console absently, the coordinates so familiar she barely has to think about them. “Here, I’ll just—”

“Where are you taking us?” he demands.

Her hand stills. 

_Oh_, she thinks. _Right_.

She turns slightly, one hand still ground into the console for balance.

“Home,” she says firmly. Gentle. Mild. _Trying_. “Of course. The same day you left.”

“No.” He shakes his head, rising painfully to his feet. “No, don’t pretend like—don’t pretend like that’s unreasonable. Don’t pretend like—”

“I’m not,” she say thinly, banishing the hurt that’s sliding hot between her ribs. He’s right. Of course he’s right. “I’m sorry. You’re right, that wasn’t—” She closes her eyes again, for the briefest of moments. What else is there to say? “I’m sorry.” 

The TARDIS lands with a shudder and a sympathetic wheeze. The doors creak open softly without her having to ask or snap her fingers, revealing Graham’s sitting room waiting just beyond. Just as they’d left it, still life in watery grey, at the edge of the warmth of the TARDIS.

Yaz breathes out quietly in what sounds like relief. 

“Not a bad parking job,” she says softly. “You didn’t crush any furniture this time.”

“I get it right sometimes,” she mutters out of habit, watching them, resigned. They muster together tentatively, tiredly, gathering around Ryan, and she’d like to help but something holds her back.

_Done enough here_, that same voice at the back of her head whispers._ Done enough damage_.

For the first time since Grace’s funeral, she feels like an intruder.

But that’s not quite fair, is it? After all, she’s gotten them home safe. Relatively. In one piece, at least. Alive. And she hasn’t landed on any of Graham’s furniture, and the Time War is back where it belongs, and all things considered it all could have gone so much worse, so why is it that she still can’t feel her _stupid_ hands—?

Ryan rouses groggily, enough to sling an arm around Yaz’s shoulder. She takes his weight without a grimace, even when his head lolls into the curve of her neck. The front of his shirt is crusted and rusty with dried blood that they’re all very determined not to look at.

“He’ll be alright?” she asks, brows drawing together. Less afraid than she’d been, but there’s uncertainty lingering in her gaze. Something fragile, soured. “Really?”

“He’ll be very tired,” the Doctor replies, biting around the blithe optimism begging to escape her lips in favour of—well. In favour of the truth. “Normally I advise against naps, ‘cos they’re boring and for babies, but he’ll need them for a while. Otherwise, he should be fine.”

Yaz’s frown doesn’t budge. “And you?”

“You know me.” She shrugs, shoulders inching towards her ears. With her free hand she tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “Much sturdier than you lot.”

Somehow, it’s the wrong thing to say. Yaz’s expression closes off with a blink. Her fingers tighten around Ryan’s arm.

“Right,” she says, with a jerky nod. Some of the ash in her hair falls onto her cheek, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “Yeah.” She swallows, oddly careful. “I’ll just—I’ll just get him in, then.”

She watches their long, slow shuffle towards the door, aching to help. Instead, her fingers stay wrapped around the console, knuckles white. Graham pauses on their heels. For a moment, a stupid part of her wonders rather desperately if he’s going to invite her in for tea, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

“Doc,” he say tiredly, all the fear leaked slowly out of him like treacle. “I think—I think you should go. But it’s not goodbye, yeah? Just—just give us some time.”

“Time,” she breathes. “Yeah. Yeah, of course. All the time you need, I’ll pop back round next Saturday, if you like. Just if you like. Or the next Saturday. Or the—the one after that. Any Saturday, really.” She forces a smile, edges her way into something that’s more chipper and less desperately relieved. Less—desperate in general, even though the word ‘goodbye’ is ringing frantically in her ears. She’s never left them like this. She’s never been asked to leave. “Usual spot, out by the estate. Safer for your chairs that way.”

“Safer,” he agrees, mild. His face has gone all—flat and hard to read, but there’s a flintiness to it that she recognizes from Ranskoor Av Kolos. Anger is cold on Graham. It sits under his skin and waits. “You’ll pop forward straight away,” he ventures.

“Oh,” she tries, as casually as she can manage. “Yeah, might do.” For once, the lie sits queasily on her tongue. “Might—well, the TARDIS has gone a bit funny, spacio-temporal disturbances and all that, bit beyond your understanding, if I’m honest—”

“When you do,” he says steadily, “we’ll talk.”

It’s not a request. She swallows, eyes darting to his feet. His shoes are grimy with ash as well.

“Yeah.” Her smile is sliding slowly into a grimace. “Right. Sure.”

“Doc.” She raises her head in acknowledgement. Graham’s gaze has softened, but she doesn’t quite know what it all means. “Take care of yourself.”

She flattens her lips and nods awkwardly, throat too tight for proper words. He leaves her white-knuckled against the console, hands still numb. Ears still ringing. In the sudden absence, the TARDIS is far too large, far too hollow, far too sallow. She dematerializes with an empty shudder. 

There’s no one to watch, anymore, and so she sinks to the ground and buries her head in her knees, hands tangling in her hair. The past few hours feel as long as days.

_Could’ve been worse_, she thinks.

“Could’ve gone better,” she mutters into her knees. 

Her side is burning, exhaustion scratchy behind her eyes. The world dims and shakes, time still twisted like a stubborn knot, rope-burned and irritated. Wounded. She should try to trace the anomaly, probably, if it doesn’t smarten up soon. Wrap up the ends cut loose by the time disruptor, set things right. After a nap, maybe, she thinks foggily, her stance on naps aside. A cup of tea. A week spent amongst the otters. Graham hadn’t said goodbye, it hadn’t been _goodbye_, but there’s still something deep inside, underneath all the hidden, moving parts of her, that’s urging her to run.She could go and be a stranger somewhere again. A traveller without a name, without a past, unknowable, unseeable.

She could try again and get it right. Wind her secrets tighter, run a little faster.

Before she can do any of those things, the cloister bell begins to ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whoops this whole thing is gonna be eight chapters instead of five, so I guess y'all are getting more than one chapter a week lmao
> 
> thanks for your kind words! hope you're enjoying, and please let me know what you thought!


	3. 3.

“No,”she thunders, springing to her feet, the world dimming at the edges. She lists to the side but grabs hold of the edge of the console. “_No_, what’s wrong? What’s—”

The TARDIS moans in disgruntlement, the cloister bell clanging. The sound rings ominous in her ears. Time—

White spots cloud her vision. She doubles over, clutching helplessly to the console’s edge. It’s a matter of _time_, of course. The whispered fringes of it catch behind her eyes, twisted and tangled and terribly wrong. The time disruptor had caught the side of her ribs, the edge of her time stream, scraped and torn it ragged. Until it scabs over, she’ll be something distinctly unpalatable to a ship that eats, sleeps, and breathes the time vortex, and the cloister bell is as much a travel advisory as she’s ever heard before.

“Sorry, old girl,” she breathes, still bent over herself. “Should’ve known.” She runs a shaking hand over the console, navigating more by touch than by sight. Trying to get them back (well, back-_ish_) to where they’d come from in one piece. “Just—”

She gives a final tug to the zig-zag-plotter, taking a moment to mourn the loss of the helmic regulator, which is managing to malfunction in ways that are truly spectacular. It’s a wonder they ended up in Sheffield at all, she realizes queasily. Hopefully it’s up to the task at least one more time.

“Oh, come on,” she begs, throwing down the dematerialization circuit. “One more trip before you give up, yeah?”

The TARDIS puts an old word at the back of her head that sounds like apology and lands with a screeching, aching moan and a final clang of the cloister bell. The lights dim. Behind her, a door creaks open.

When she uncurls herself and straightens to look, she has to wince at the white light now seeping into the console room. Just beyond the stairs, there’s a door that wasn’t there before.

“I thought we jettisoned that ages ago,” she mutters, blinking tiredly up at the Zero Room. The cool light emanating from it beckons invitingly. “Did you build a new one? If you’re trying to be subtle, you’re not doin’ a very good job of it.”

_Barn in the desert_, the TARDIS insists stubbornly. The door to the Zero Room swings open another hair. Even just the light from it feels like cool air on her face. For a moment, she can’t think of anything except how tired she is, how wonderful it would feel to be able to sink into zero-gravity, tuck herself away from the universe and _sleep_—

But her hands are still numb and trembling. Once, during the war, she’d been blind-sided similarly. Spat out onto a planet and into a coma that had lasted for weeks, the TARDIS lost, the Zero Room long jettisoned. The memory is so old and scalded over now that the image of it is barely more than a faded watercolour, but there’s an old, old fear settled in the pit of her stomach. The sorts of dreams she might have, alone in there, trapped in a trance that could last days, weeks, months—

She swallows, feeling ill with exhaustion. Playing the part of the coward today, in none of the usual good ways.

“No,” she says softly, patting the console gently. The TARDIS wheezes sharply in disapproval. “But thank you.”

The coordinates read _Sheffield _and that’s good enough for her. Even with the helmic regulator out of sorts, it doesn’t look like she’s landed too far ahead. They’d all needed some time, anyway. Maybe the malfunction has actually set things right, for once. The TARDIS won’t take off happily until her timeline’s all scabbed over and safe again. Maybe it won’t take as long this time, she consoles herself. She turns to the doors and straightens her coat smartly. Shoulders up. Deep breath.

Time heals all wounds. It softens the edges of memories, too, and so maybe by now things will be less tense. She can try to apologize again, and Yaz will drag her in for tea and maybe let her nap on her sofa, and then when things are all better they can all take off again. The universe will set itself right. The past can be kicked back behind the door, like she prefers.

“Right,” she says, striding out the doors.

—

Sheffield is grey and drizzly with rain that dampens the collar of her coat immediately. She pulls up her hood as an afterthought as she wanders through unfamiliar streets, only vaguely sure of the direction she’s headed. The TARDIS, she takes a moment to think irritatedly, is overly fond of convoluted side streets, as always.

If she’s honest, the most she’s ever seen of Sheffield, really, had been the first night she’d arrived, and her memory of it is all full of holes and fizzing bangs and adrenaline. But they’d done a fair bit of dashing about during that business with all the spiders, too, and she’s fairly sure her feet will take her where she needs to go. The slow path doesn’t suit her, most of the time, but once in a while—

Well. She’s always been good at wandering.

The air smells of winter, and it must be early this year, because she could have sworn when they’d all left it had been autumn. The leaves have all shed from the trees, soaked and trampled underfoot, and the scant daylight is watery. Tepid. British winter, she thinks, but the thought is actually rather fond. Always so soggy and grey. Though there might be snow in the forecast, if her nose is right.

She slogs through the streets, hands in her pockets. Thinking in a straight line is harder than usual, but letting her mind wander off seems like a bad idea at the moment. Instead, she keeps her eyes on the shiny pavement and tries not to meander into people and makes her way absently through the prime numbers—starting with one.

She only makes it to 7867 before a bundled shape comes flying out of a side-street. The air gets knocked out of her lungs as she and the shape stumble back into the pavement, scattering pedestrians. Her boot catches in a puddle that soaks through her socks.

“Oi,” she huffs, breathless and frowning. Her ribs are burning with the impact. “I was _factoring_.”

The shape shudders and moans and the shape is a human, she realizes (well, she thinks a second later, _of course_), as shaking hands reach out to clamp onto her upper arms. The knuckles whiten.

“Please,” the man whispers, almost keening. His eyes are very wide, and his pupils don’t look quite right. The thin jacket he’s wearing is soaked through and stained. His fingernails are dirty. “Please, I—”

“Oh, it’s alright,” she soothes, primes forgotten, taking his hands in her own. The people they’d disrupted are moving around them now, some muttering in irritation, some not. Brief spectacle and a bit of suffering and it’s not enough to catch anyone’s eye, not today, not in the wet and the cold. She’d be cross about it, if she could spare the thought. Time is twisted like a rope, around her, around the shuddering man.

She looks past him to the alley.

“I have to go,” he insists, struggling against her grip. “I have to—I have to—”

“What did you see?” she asks, looking back at him. “In there, what did you see?”

He shakes his head. “I—”

“I can help,” she insists.

A shuddering breath escapes him, tremors shaking his entire body. His odd, dilated eyes meet hers and a timeline whispers past them like a breath and for a moment his eyes fill completely with black before it writes itself over. The whites of his eyes are only shiny in the daylight and he rips his hands from her own and tears off into the street.

“Wait!” she calls, but her voice doesn’t carry. He disappears into the crowd all too quickly. She could chase him, but—

The alley pulls.

The sonic is warm in her hand before she can even think to bring it out.

“Family of raccoons?” she wonders aloud, realizing with a pang that there’s no one around to listen. She steps into the alley, time still stuck oddly in her throat, hands shaking. “Would love it, if this were just a family of racoons. Love a racoon family, me.”

The alley is cold and dripping. Puddles slosh under her feet as she ventures deeper.

“Of course,” she mutters, “sometimes a mystery is just as good.”

Rubbish bins and stacked crates clutter the space as she edges in, sonic white-knuckled in her hand. A shopping cart full of odds and ends and a makeshift shelter that must have belonged to the man. There’s nothing that the eye can see, and so maybe the man had just been jumping at shadows, afraid of nothing, but—

The back of her neck prickles. Cold air on her skin as she turns abruptly to face the entrance to the alley, but there’s still nothing there. People trudge past in the damp and the cold, unalarmed. The sonic beeps. It tells her nothing that she doesn’t already know—namely, that at the moment she’s barely more than a walking, talking, quasi-paradox. She scowls down at it.

“It’s not my fault,” she protests, side aching, side-stepping around the familiarity of it all. She’d spent practically the whole war the same way, more paradox than person. Timeline upon timeline twisted over another, perverse and obscene. They’d been aching wounds in a tattered universe, the lot of them, so disgusting that their own TARDISes could hardly stand any of them, could barely pilot them.Some of the newer types hadn’t been able to at all, and so they’d been salvaged into paradox machines, of course. “History can take it,” she mutters, shuddering. “It’s only me, this time. I’m not that big of an anomaly. Give me a day or two to sort it out and it’ll all be fine.”

The sonic says nothing in reply, thankfully.

Maybe she’s the one jumping at shadows, she wonders gloomily, wandering back out into the light of the street. All but begging for a problem to solve, instead of more things to break. The press and wake of time around her is her own fault, more than likely. A local effect that no one else will even notice. It’s just—

She glances over her shoulder as she turns a corner, Yaz’s estate a gloomy monument in the distance, finally visible.

She can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s somehow being watched.

The feeling persists as she makes her way to Yaz’s flat, but the gloom of the rain and the difficulty she’s having keeping everything in a straight line make it hard to say whether it’s a product of her own imagination or not. Messing about with time can have odd effects, odd consequences. People become their own voyeurs, watching themselves unravel. Every moment, every second, a billion things could happen, don’t happen, will happen, and when it all gets cracked open—

_Enough to turn Rassilon himself a bit funny_, she remembers hearing muttered in the bowels of ships and trenches. And of course, well. In the end, it _had_.

Her boots drip onto the lino as she enters the building and she pauses at the noticeboard. Her eyes skim over a lost cat, a found bike, an invitation for Sunday roast. All mundane, all very real. Suddenly, it all feels a bit silly. She should have tried to call first. Yaz might be at work, or she might be busy, or she might not—

“Doctor?”

She turns, grey speckling the edge of her sight with the sudden motion.

“Yaz’s mum!” she greets, spotting Najia as she heads toward the lift, briefcase in hand, bundled in a raincoat.

Najia doesn’t move closer. She doesn’t set down her briefcase. She only looks back at her, unreadable.

“There’s blood on your hands,” she points out, after a long, awkward moment. “And on your coat.”

The Doctor looks down instinctively, eyes catching with chagrin on the rusted stains marring the front of her coat. Her hands, too, and it’s a wonder she hadn’t noticed earlier. Dried and flaky.

“Er,” she says, resisting the urge to plunge them into her pockets like a child. “Long story,” she tries, though she suspects that it lands rather unconvincingly. Her nose wrinkles. “Nothing to worry about. Is Yaz in?”

“Yaz isn’t home,” she says, eventually. She swallows. “You look just like she did the other day. All covered in soot and dust. Blood.”

“Oh, I was just—” Her stupid brain isn’t working fast enough and she grasps fruitlessly for some kind of explanation. She keeps her voice bright for a faint hope of compensating. “Er, doing some—autumn cleaning. In my attic. Which I definitely have. Autumn cleaning, that is a thing, isn’t it? Like spring cleaning, only—not.”

She clears her throat in the ensuing silence.

“They travel with you, don’t they.” There’s an edge to Najia’s voice today that’s unfamiliar. A hair beyond suspicion, probably. She’s always found mothers hard to read, and even harder to understand. “The three of them. You take them away.”

For a moment, the Doctor’s mouth hangs open, unsure of what to say. Her brain had been expecting an exchange of awkward niceties and perhaps another uncomfortable hug. Instead, it’s all got the feel of an impromptu interrogation, and she’s even more out of her depth than usual.

Najia steps forward, oddly intense. “Yaz won’t say, but it’s true, isn’t it. The whole time she was missing, I wondered.” Another step. A sharp breath, and her face is tense with fear. “And now you’re back. You won’t take her again,” she insists, glaring. “I don’t care who, or—_what_ you are, you won’t—”

“Hold on, hold on. Missing?” she interrupts. Dread like a stone is sinking slowly to the pit of her stomach. _Helmic regulator_, she takes a moment to think numbly. _Oh, no_.

Najia stills. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know,” she breathes. “Nearly four weeks. A whole month. Like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth, until she showed up last week in the same clothes she’d left in.” She swallows harshly. “I thought—we all thought—”

“Oh, no,” she says, scraping a hand down her mouth. The world dims around the edges, but it’s just because her hearts are beating too quickly in her throat. The same stupid, fruitless anger from before starts to simmer again in the pit of her stomach. Of course. Of course things have gone even more wrong. “Najia—”

“I know you had something to do with it.”

“Najia,” she tries, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her ear. There’s no point in denying it, though there’s a loud, clanging part of her that would really like to try. “I can explain.”

“I don’t think you can, actually,” Najia says, shaking her head slowly, and maybe she’s smarter than the rest of them after all. “And I don’t think I want you to. You’re dangerous. Yaz is different, ever since you two met. She’s got her head off in space, she’s been lying to me. And then she just—” Her lips press together tensely, and she draws a breath in through her nose. “She just disappeared.”

“But she’s alright,” she says, half-asking. “She came back.”

“This time.”

The Doctor closes her eyes. Just for a moment. “Najia,” she tries, one more time, but in the pit of her she knows there’s no point.

“She didn’t come back the same.” She opens her eyes, and Najia’s gaze is steady. Full of worry that only makes sense, suspicion that’s more than warranted, but this stupid body wants to be _liked_ by everyone it meets, and it all still stings. “She doesn’t sleep well anymore. She couldn’t even tell me where she’d been.”

“I—” _I can explain_ stays on the tip of her tongue, but it doesn’t sit quite right. “I think it has to be for her to say.”

Najia doesn’t disagree. Her eyes only darken, grip tightening around the handle of her briefcase.

“She’s old enough to make her own choices,” she says quietly. “But she’s my child, Doctor, and I—”

Her lips close around the rest of the words, but the message is clear.

The Doctor swallows. “Right. Yeah, of course. I’ll—” She tucks her hair needlessly behind her ear again, head ducking. She doesn’t look up as Najia’s footsteps echo damply across the lino. She waits for the sound of the lift.

She leaves. 

—

On her way back to the TARDIS, hood up, she stops by the same alley again, that same pull from before beckoning. It’s not so much a call as it’s like a fish tugging on a line. Something alive and squirming, _I’m here! I’m here!_

But it’s just as empty as before. She leans wearily against a brick wall slimy with rain, taking it all in. The scattered bins, the rubbish. Looming, twisting shadows, but it is, after all, still an alley.

The man’s things, though. She squints into the gloom, trying to nudge her brain into working a hair quicker. The shopping cart is gone. There’s not even a trace of him, not a scrap of fabric or a piece of lint. In fact, she realizes, prowling closer, there’s not even a discolouration in the pavement where his belongings had been sitting, protecting the pavement from the rain.

She crouches down, dips a finger down to scrape at damp concrete, and sticks it in her mouth contemplatively. It tastes of rain and pollution and pavement and not much else. She sits back on her haunches, frowning.

“Well, now I’m confused,” she says aloud, rather pointlessly. There’s still no one around to listen, and it aches more than it should. She’s hardly spent a minute alone, in this body. She drops them off and jumps ahead, with barely a few seconds in between adventures, sometimes. She’s been a body dripped in melancholy, she’s been the sort of man that preferred to brood and wallow, but that’s not her anymore. She’s different now.

And she’s forgotten how to be alone.

“Oi!” a voice calls from the front of the alley.

Her side throbs sickeningly as she stands. The world wavers, but she stumbles out as gracefully as she can manage, squinting into the rain.

“Hiya,” she ventures, taking in the stocky silhouette of a man in an exciting orange vest, dwarfed by an even more exciting moustache. His umbrella looks comically small in the depths of his impressive grip. The black of it catches slick and shiny in the rain.

His face relaxes as she nears the light.

“Oh, good,” he sighs. “Was worried you were—well. Somethin’ else.”

“Somethin’ else? What sort of something?” she demands, stumbling a step closer. He leans back instinctively. “Something interesting?”

“Well—” His face tightens, automatically defensive. “You can read about it on page three,” he says, and for the first time she notices the rather soggy stack of newspapers he’s got in the hand not holding onto the umbrella. “For 50p,” he adds on quickly.

She leans in. “Empty pockets,” she says, eyebrows raising. “I don’t suppose you could just tell me.”

He frowns. “That would be bad business.”

She wrinkles her nose in frustration. Some humans are full of all the human-y-ness that makes them humans in the best way—and some are not.

“What if I told you,” she says, fumbling in her pocket for the psychic paper, rain pelting down on her hood, “that I was here on top secret orders?”

Whatever it ends up saying seems to work, because the man takes another step back, eyes fixing on her in awe.

“I didn’t,” he mumbles, breath trembling. “I didn’t think you’d come. I’ve been sending letters, but I never thought…”

She frowns at him, confused, but when she flips the psychic paper over, it clarifies very little. A drop of rain rolls down the clumsy FBI badge staring up at her.

“I wasn’t sure you had jurisdiction here,” he continues, still staring at her in wonder, moustache trembling. “But I thought, if anyone could help—”

“Er,” she interrupts, pocketing the psychic paper again. She smiles back at him. “Special Yorkshire Division. Now what’s the problem, exactly?”

He leans in, as though what he’s about to tell her is very secret indeed. She does her best to look appropriately serious, on the off-chance that it _is_, in fact, very secret.

“Well, it’s them shades, you see,” he says quietly, glancing furtively behind her into the alley. “Ghosts, like. You’ll have heard about ‘em, seeing as they sent you.”

She clears her throat, frowning in acknowledgement. “Right. Yes. Of course. But,” she clears her throat again. “We’re very interested in the, er. ‘News from the street’. It’s a bottom-up approach, y’see, puts the civilian voice into perspective.”

“Oh, of course,” he breathes. “Naturally. Well—” He takes another glance around them, as though expecting one of the subjects of their conversation to come railing out from behind a shrub. “Round about a month ago they started showing up, yeah? Sightings all over town, just—shapeless forms. Dark. And not like all them other times,” he insists furtively, “not like people’s dead relatives or nothing, they’re just…” He shudders. “Just shadows, like. Creepy as all hell.”

“Shadows.” She frowns. “Is that it?”

He blinks at her, seemingly offended. “Ain’t that enough?”

“Of course, of course,” she soothes, though her brain’s already gone tearing off in other directions, thinking. “Just—thought there might be more to it,” she says absently, scratching the back of her neck. The movement of her arm shifts her coat, and the man’s eyes finally catch on the rusty stains on the front of it. He looks at her a bit more carefully.

“How’d you know to find me?” he wonders in a small voice, taking a minuscule step backwards.

He’s teetering on the edge of suspicion, she can tell, but she’s not sure she’s good enough at being people to stop it from happening. She taps the side of her nose, aiming for charmingly secretive.

“Well, we’ve got people everywhere,” she says, before she can think of something less alarming to say,and it plays exactly wrong. The man swallows, the blood leaving his face. He takes another step back.

“Right,” he says faintly, taking her in entirely for the first time, and whatever he sees makes the lines around his eyes tight with fear. “Well, I’ll just be—”

“Hold on,” she says. He jumps. She’s too tired to feel bad about it. She holds a rust-stained hand out instead, beseeching. “Can I have a paper, then? For evidence.”

He’s too afraid now to refuse. A paper, slightly damp, gets pressed into her waiting hand.

“Page three,” he reminds her, ignoring her muttered thanks.

“Sorry, one last thing,” she says to his back as he turns to leave, the slump of his shoulders relieved. He pauses to look back at her reluctantly. “You’re here often, yeah? Selling your questionable newspapers.”

He frowns back at her, nodding.

“There was a man in the alley, earlier. It sort of looked like maybe he was living there. Can you tell me where he might have gone?”

The frown only deepens. “I’ve never seen anyone back there,” he says. “Not any man, or anyone. Sorry.”

She blinks, at that. “Right,” she breathes, eyes flitting to the alley. When she turns back to bid him farewell, he’s already gone. The air is heavy, suddenly, on the back of her neck. “Right.”

The newspaper he’d handed her doesn’t look like the sorts of newspapers she’s used to. The front cover is plastered with reports of Loch Ness Monster sightings, and the very first page is an article discussing which members of the royal family are most likely to be werewolves. She tears the third page out, nose wrinkling, and throws the rest of it to the ground to land in a puddle. The blurry photo of the alleged Nessie quickly grows soggy and crumpled.

“Zygons,” she mutters, glaring down at the image. “Never could pick up after themselves. Leavin’ monsters in lakes all over the place. Just messy, is what it is.”

There’s no reply. No conversation. Just herself and her own thoughts and time itself, a tangled, lonely thread. She looks down at the article in her hand. The ink is starting to run.

She should leave, but she can’t. She doesn’t want to leave, but she should. Yaz’s mum had been right, after all. She is dangerous. The ship had been an accident, the weapon had been an accident, the ceiling caving in—

All an accident. But her hand in it is undeniable, even if it reaches back far, far. She’d thought to keep all those parts of her separate from them, keep them all safe from it, keep herself safe from it, but between the Dalek at New Years and now all this—

Dangerous. Whether she wants to be or not.

She stumbles blearily back through the side streets, as dusk approaches. The TARDIS is exactly where she left it, a silent monument. She leans her forehead against the doors, but doesn’t open them.

_Barn in the desert_, the TARDIS says, worried.

“I know,” she says, thinking of the Zero Room half with hate, half with longing. She’s so tired that her eyelids hurt. “But I’m all twisted and tangled. It’d be like having Jack or something worse hanging around your insides, and no one wants that.”

_Barn in the desert_. Stubborn.

_I won’t hurt you too,_ is what she’d like to say, but she doesn’t. The TARDIS catches it anyway. There’s a discontented rumble from within. The image of a lone daisy flashes in her mind’s eye. It’s an old memory, and it doesn’t quite make sense, but it makes longing flash in the depths of her, hot and quick.

She rolls her forehead away from the doors, wrinkling her nose in irritation, and slides to the ground with her knees up. Taking shelter. Her hood stays up. The rain pelts into the cramped alleyway, bouncing off the narrow walls into shiny puddles. People pass by on the pavement just beyond in eclectic clusters, some silent, some talking. Some alone, some together. Hunched and sour under umbrellas, heads back to the sky in delight. All sorts.

The piece of newspaper is still folded in her hand, slightly damp now, the inked words irreparably smudged. Time twists and spits with the rain, and she lets potentialities play out like the evening news, too tired to keep track of their proper order. A business man drops his briefcase in a puddle, swears into the gloom until a young woman stops to help him. A business man stumbles in the rain and carries on, shoes shiny and wet with the light from passing cars. People stop and go and stop and go and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. Life generally gets where it needs to, regardless.

She watches it all until her eyelids finally slide closed.

—

The shine of a torchlight is what wakes her, before the nightmares can.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” the voice cuts in as she grapples with consciousness, feeling oddly grateful for the interruption. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. “But I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Is there—“

The Doctor blinks herself awake. That voice—that _voice_—

She struggles blearily upwards, clutching at the edge of the TARDIS, relief sour in her gut.

“—someone I can call for you?” Yaz trails off, washed out in the early morning gloom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	4. 4.

She watches Yaz blink in realization as her torch catches on the TARDIS in its entirety, as it becomes something more than a vague shape in the darkness. Her hair is strung tightly back from her face. Not a pin out of place, like she’s trying to make up for her absence with her appearance, and in the gloom she looks dreadfully tired.

The fog of sleep evaporates. Guilt floods in to take its place.

“Not unless you plan on phonin’ yourself,” the Doctor says hoarsely, leveraging herself upright, smothering her delight at a familiar face, because Yaz’s expression is only growing stony at the sight of her. She can’t help the twist of her stomach. She swallows. Of course. _Of course_, she reminds herself sharply. “Yaz, I— “

“I thought you might be around,” is all she says, and she doesn’t even sound cross. Just tired. “Mum was acting weird.” She turns off her torch and crosses her arms. Her tone edges towards exasperated. “What are you doin’, sleeping out here? Do I even want to know?”

“Yaz,” she breathes, dodging, because it’s not remotely important at the moment. She has to know—has to know she didn’t mean it, has to know she didn’t _want_ it, “Yaz, I’m so—“

“It’s fine.” Clipped. It’s not fine, clearly, but she has no idea how to fix it. She has no idea if Yaz even _wants_ her to fix it, and selfishly, stupidly, that feels much worse.

The silence hangs between them for a moment.

“They didn’t fire you,” she observes, a bit cautious.

Yaz presses her lips together. “No. But in case you didn’t notice, I am patrolling Sheffield’s back streets for the homeless before dawn on a Saturday, so.” She closes her eyes for just a moment, and the press of her lips turns bitter. “Didn’t think I’d ever miss the parking disputes.”

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor says, though it gets swallowed by the gloom. “Really, I am.”

Yaz only looks at her. Her gaze is flat and exhausted. There’s not even any room for the anger that she must be feeling. There’s just vacuum, sucking all the air out from between them. “What are you doin’, Doctor?”

The smile she tries is weak and ill-received. “You going to give me a fine, PC Khan?”

“No.” Her arms drop to her sides. Unimpressed. “I know you don’t have any money. I’d only be paying it out my own pocket.”

Empty pockets. It always comes down to the empty pockets. She swallows dryly.

“I’m—the TARDIS needs—needed some repairs.” Her hand dives into her left pocket, fishing. The thought surfaces, insistent and embarrassingly desperate, that she ought to prove somehow that she’s not just—hanging about. Moping around, waiting for them all.She unearths the crumpled newspaper article, holding it out, eyebrows raising. “After all that.” She skids indelicately around it. “Not safe to inhabit, for the moment. And I was just—just wandering around, I was going to leave once she was fixed, but I found this, corroborated some readings. So I thought, well, I’d better stick around, investigate.”

She keeps her tone bright, casual. It’s not _unconvincing_.

Yaz’s brows draw together as she takes the torn-out article, glancing down at her suspiciously.

“And you didn’t come to see any of us?” She eyes the TARDIS again critically. “How long have you been here, exactly?”

“I—“ Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, uncertain of how much of the truth to let out. She’s usually quicker on her feet, lying. Yaz catches her hesitation, expression souring.“Just a night,” she allows, tentative, trying to curtail the disappointment before it happens, but she won’t be quick enough, she can already tell. “I meant to see you, I suppose. Only I didn’t realize—I thought I’d dropped you in the right place, y’see, so I went to look for you and then I ran into your mum, and—“

“Ran the other way.” Flat. Disappointed. But not surprised. “Instead of coming to apologize.” She draws a breath. “Why didn’t you come back right away?” she asks suddenly. “Why didn’t you come back and fix it? My parents—”

Her mouth presses into a hard line.

“Yaz,” the Doctor says, as gently as she can. “I’m sorry, but—once you step out the TARDIS doors…” she trails off. “Some things are fixed in time. You know that, ‘cos you had to learn it.”

Yaz shakes her head minutely, still on the edge of furious. But it’s all very tidy, all very contained.

“It was just a small thing,” she protests. “You could’ve fixed it. You could’ve at least come back to help us _explain_—”

“What use would I have been?” she interrupts, still feeling the burn of Najia’s glare on her cheek. “And it’s not just a small thing, it’s more complicated than that. It’s far more complicated than I can explain right now.”

“You keep saying that. I’m not sure I believe you anymore.”

As she speaks, Yaz takes the slightest step forward, her well-polished boots edging into the puddle gathering in front of the TARDIS. Only she doesn’t. Instead she folds her arms across her chest and stands there perfectly still, or she flattens her lips into a stronger glare and turns her head, or she does nothing at all. All at once, all the same, all small things that add up to things that are impossibly large.

(and in the background of it all, she can feel her own timelines circling round, pieces being roped off, frayed ends being cut loose, desperately trying to repair the parts that had been gouged out and ruined, keep everything coherent, keep the paradox of it all from eating her alive—)

She swallows back the shame of it queasily, fingers twitching in her lap. The world’s still running at a tilt, bending and shifting like a boat on the sea. Her ribs burn, and she’s suddenly painfully aware of how she must look, grimy and still streaked rather liberally with blood, though the gloom is helping her in that regard. Hiding the worst of it, though it’s all still probably a bit—

Pathetic.

“Thought I’d give you some more time,” she mutters, but she knows it lands unconvincingly. “I wasn’t sure…“

By the looks of it, Yaz isn’t entirely sure either. Her lips are flat but her eyes are frustrated, like she can’t decide if what she’s feeling is worry or irritation, and so she’s settled on both. She glances down at the paper, frowning. Behind her, the sun is beginning to creep upwards between office buildings, lonely.

“Ghosts,” she says quietly, after a moment. She raises an eyebrow. It’s not quite an olive branch. “That’s a bit much, even for us, isn’t it?”

The Doctor looks past her, eyes on the sun. “I’ve met loads of ghosts,” she protests absently. Her hands are still limp in her lap, but they’re starting to shake. She clenches them into fists, swallowing. “Even during Christmas while Charles Dickens was there, one time. ‘Course, it’s not usually supernatural, it’s usually—“

”If it’s not proper ghosts,” Yaz interrupts, evidently not feeling good-natured enough to see her rambling through to the end, despite the olive branch, “then what is it? Should we be worried?”

She’s not used to being cut-off like that, anymore. Yaz especially usually hangs on every word, no matter how ridiculous. For an awkward moment her jaw just hangs open, mid-sentence.

“No,” she says eventually, blinking herself back together. _Come on, brain. Stay on track_. “Well, maybe. Well, probably not, but I’m not quite sure what it is yet— “

“If it’s anything.”

“Well, of course it’s _something_, I wouldn’t just— “

—_hang around here for no reason_, she doesn’t say, only that’s probably a lie, isn’t it. They’d left her alone for half a minute, not even forever, no one had even said _forever_, and she’d barely been able to stand it, and it’s pasted all over her stupid face. Literally. She can feel the flush, high on her cheeks.

Yaz purses her lips in a familiar half-scowl and it’s not worry she’s been catching in those eyes, is it. It’s pity. Pity, losing its war with irritation, and for a moment she longs for an older face, a more stoic face, a face made for grouchiness and vitriol. The eyebrows, the wrinkles, the easy glare. It had always been much easier to hide everything, in a face like that.

Maybe that had been the point of her, actually, but it’s all back-fired rather spectacularly, hasn’t it. She’d burned her way into a face that had nothing to hide and then wrapped herself in lies, and now—

She glances down into her lap. She can’t quite tell if the ache in her gut is loneliness or the after-effects of the disruptor. In the distance, the sun finally rounds the top of the skyline, burning in her peripheral vision. Sharp. The air _twists_ and she tries not to shudder.

“But it’s nothing to worry about, probably,” she mumbles, and if she could stand, she would. Yaz has work to do, a life to get back to that she’s all but ruined. The mystery can wait. This adventure’s not for sharing. She’s done enough, and if she could get up and leave she would, but instead she settles for wrapping her shaking hands around the edge of the TARDIS, knuckles whitening. Making her intent clear, at least. “I’ll just—I’ll just let you—“

“You’ve been here all night.” The paper crumples in Yaz’s grasp. She takes in a breath, and the Doctor can’t see her face, she can’t untangle any meaning from it. “Outside the TARDIS. Why?”

And that’s Yaz, isn’t it, shrewd as ever, _kind_ as ever, voice edged with that same pity that she doesn’t deserve and doesn’t want. Even if she sounds like she might be underwater. Her brain has picked a terrible time to wander off, she can’t help but think. She swallows dryly as Yaz crouches in front of her, frowning. Her stomach turns with the pitch and roil of the world. Time seizes and stops and starts, and she’s the eye of her own storm, watching dizzily as reality scrapes against her.

It’s the early morning sun that’s been her undoing. Yaz’s frown deepens with the light as it finally reaches them, once, twice, over and over. She breathes shallow through her mouth, hearts pounding in her throat. Yaz’s hand might reach cautiously for her chin, or reach into her back pocket for her phone, or not reach for her at all, as the timeline skips and skitters like a bad recording. Bile rises in her throat, grey spots speckling her vision as everything twists in on itself and ties a knot.

“Why are you still hurt?” Yaz demands quietly, making a decision, calloused fingers gentle on her face as she tilts it to inspect. “Why haven’t you—“

Time stills, for now, but the damage is done. Has been done? Was done, will be done—

Yaz flattens her lips, unsettled. “I’m calling Graham.” Her voice is firm as she stands. 

“No,” she protests, latching onto the seconds passing by like pearls. The words are cotton in her mouth. _Run_, that stupid voice at the back of her head insists, _you’ve done enough, you’ve done enough_—

“It’s not up for debate,” Yaz says, and her phone is already at her ear. Her free hand grasps at the air, spasms with annoyance. “Just—“

“It’s fine,” she tries, panicking now, “really, you don’t—”

Everything is still just a bit cracked, just a bit wrong, reality flummoxed enough by her presence that she can pull a timeline where she managed to stand out of thin air and paste it in place clumsily. Grey shapes shimmer at the edge of her sight, and as the ground rushes up to meet her she realizes tiredly that she hasn’t managed to pluck from a timeline where she _stays_ standing, and that it’s turned out to be quite the oversight, probably.

There’s a moment where she thinks Yaz might catch her, but the timeline flits away, and she hits the pavement with a muffled cry.

Luckily, after that, it all goes blessedly quiet.

—

The quiet never lasts.

She wakes suddenly with smoke at the back of her throat, time tangled behind her eyes. Alone. The sofa in Graham and Ryan’s sitting room is as comfortable as ever, but her ribs are burning. Even the feel of her clothes against her skin and the blanket someone has thrown over her are just on the edge of unbearable.

She thinks about struggling upwards and gives the idea up for the moment, pressing the palms of her hands into her eyes. Embarrassment creeps up the back of her neck. She’s messed all of this up rather terribly. _Very_ terribly. There was a point in her life, she thinks, scraping her hands down her face, where she wouldn’t have been at all bothered about bothering other people. The man she’d been before had taken a perverse sort of delight in willfully misinterpreting requests to leave, or any notion that he might not be wanted somewhere.

In a pinch, she could still do it. Bumble her way back in, feign charming ignorance and make everyone tea to apologize, but all this is a bit—_big_, for that. A cup of tea won’t fix it. In fact, there’s that niggling voice at the back of her head still saying she probably can’t fix it at all, and she’s not built for this sort of thing anymore. She’s messed things up, and they can’t be fixed, and she should leave, before—

Shame sits queasily behind her teeth.

_Before you have to face any of it?_ The voice at the back of her head spouts accusingly._ Yep_, the sharper voice at the front of her head replies, with far too much enthusiasm.

She ignores them both, for now. There’s a note left tucked under her arm that she’d missed before, but it gets dislodged as her hands come down from her face. _Doc_, she reads blearily, in Graham’s haphazard scrawl, _if you happen to wake up (though I sort of hope you don’t, because you look a right sight) I popped down to the chemist. Shower two doors down your right, biscuits in the cupboard. — Graham._

It’s not unfriendly, exactly. In fact, it’s probably kind, because for all the man can hold a grudge, she chooses her friends so carefully and he’s as golden as the rest. But she pictures his face, hunched over Ryan, unspeakably human and anguished and angry, and the pit in her stomach spreads up to her lungs and before she can even think about it she’s moving shakily to stand, her eyes on the hallway.

She can’t stay here.

The standing itself is a bit of an adventure, but once she’s up the thought of making it to the door seems less like an impossibility. More of a slight improbability, but she’s good at improbable. Even impossible, on her good days, six impossible things before breakfast, just like Alice, and her thoughts are doing the thing again, aren’t they, nothing will_ stay where she puts it_—

But she has to leave. She grits her teeth and hobbles to the door, grey doing its best to encroach on her vision, painfully nauseous. Time still won’t run the way it’s meant to, and it’s doing horrid things to her balance. Reality isn’t meant to _tilt_, or hang by a string, or be _remotely visible_, even to someone like her, but the edges of dimensions that she’s not meant to see poke at her periphery.

It would have been alarming, at one point in her life. Now, it’s almost easy to ignore, if only because she’s seen the sorts of things she was never meant to see more times than she can count. They’d weaponized that sort of thing, back in the day. Twisted time itself into something deadly, because crushing your opponent or blowing them up was all well and good, but wasn’t it better to ensure that they had never existed at all? Unravel them completely, take their history and wipe it out, take their timeline and unspool it?

Far more civilized.

Her stomach twists and she takes a moment to hang on the bannister of the stairs by the entrance, knuckles whitening around the railing. The door is so close. A step or two and she’ll be outside. A step or two more and she’ll be out of sight, too.

She’d forgotten a bit, is the only thing. Forgotten what it felt like to be hit by something that was doing its best to unravel her entire history. She can’t remember who invented them, the time disruptors, whether it was the Time Lords or the Daleks, but in the end it hadn’t mattered. They’d evolved into a horrifyingly slapdash weapon, cobbled together with pieces of the leftovers deemed too horrible to reconstruct. They’d been untested and deeply unethical. Nasty. A full hit to the chest might have actually done her in, she decides dizzily, though it would have taken a while. Lots of timeline to unspool, not even counting the bits that haven’t happened yet. The odd four billion years not necessarily accounted for. Alternate selves, alternate futures, _well_—she’s ran the gamut of things that might make her unmaking rather complicated. Even still, she’s probably lucky. This isn’t pleasant, but it won’t kill her. Probably. She’s not being unmade, she’s just being—

Everything shudders again, and she swallows, still clutching the bannister like a lifeline. Potentialities spool out in front of her, and there’s someone about to come in the door only there’s not only there might be only yes there is, it’s happening, it’s _now_—

Graham edges his way past the door, his arms full of bags. He also doesn’t look at all surprised to see her. The bags in his hands rustle as they’re set down on the floor.

“Oh good,” he breathes, mild. He looks damp and weary in the sallow hall light and it’s probably her fault. “I was worried if I left you’d do a runner.” He glances at her, a bit uncharitably, as he turns to lock the door. “Glad to see my instincts were spot on, I do love being right. Cheers.”

“I’m not— “ she tries, on principle.

“Oh, don’t,” he says, retrieving his bags and edging past her to the sitting room. “Just don’t, Doc.”

She rests her head on the bannister, defeated, frustrated with herself. Half a minute earlier—

Well. She swallows queasily. It’s not as though she’d have made it very far anyway, probably.

There’s a hand at her back.

“Come on,” he says. It’s a bit kinder, though she almost wishes it weren’t, and she raises her head. “No getting out of this one, Doc, especially now I’ve blown twenty quid on soup and paracetamol. What do you think you’re doing anyhow?” he demands, as he helps her stumble blearily back to the sofa in the sitting room. ”Roaming around Sheffield like some kind of mad-woman, raving about ghosts. You gave poor Yaz a proper scare, dropping on her like that.”

“They’re not ghosts,” she says, as he deposits her back on the sofa, because it’s the easiest thing to address at the moment. She blinks harshly against the slow spin of the world, hands out in front of her. “Well, I mean, they look like ghosts, obviously, but they can’t be real ghosts because probably they don’t exist, and the last few times I’ve run into things that people _think_ are ghosts, they’ve turned out to be something far worse.”

Graham crouches down, looking rather unhappy about it. He looks her in the eye.

“So you don’t know what they are.”

“I don’t know what they are,” she admits. “Anyway, sorry, didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean to—I’ll just kip on your sofa until everything stops spinning and then I’ll be on my way again.”

“That’s a rubbish apology and you know it, Doc.”

Her hands drop to her lap, and her gaze drops with them. She fiddles with the hem of her coat.

“Would you accept a real one?” she asks, risking a glance upward.

Graham gazes back at her steadily. “Maybe a week ago,” he says, finally.

Right. Shame burns its way back onto her cheeks. She ducks her head, gut twisting.

“Is Ryan alright?” It’s an obvious change of subject, but she can’t think of what else to say.

“He’s fine,” Graham says quietly. “Tired—”

“That’s normal. Should pass.”

“—and also fired, though between you and me, he weren’t too upset about it. He’s overqualified, now he’s got that NVQ, and he knows it. But he ain’t too happy with you.”

She twists her fingers together. “I’m sorry, Graham—”

“_Not about_—”

He pauses for so long that she finally looks up, confused. There’s frustration in the line of his mouth, the shine of his eyes.

“Not about what happened on the ship,” he says, dark enough that she figures he’s probably angry enough about it still for the both of them. “You just up and left, Doc. You stranded us. The lies I’ve had to come up with—”

“You asked me to leave,” she says, but it’s very small. “And I did come back. Only I—I didn’t realize I’d dropped you back too late. I—” She thinks unwillingly of Rose Tyler, for the first time in far too long, and it doesn’t help at all with the guilt. “It’s happened before, is the thing, it’s the helmic regulator, I don’t always—I don’t always get the temporal coordinates bang on, spent months once trying to get a stroppy Australian back to Heathrow, but I never realized before how—”

She hesitates.

“—how much of a mess it makes of your lives. I mean, I suppose I did realize, but it never seemed all that important, before.” His gaze darkens and she realizes she’s talked herself into a hole again. “And of course it’s important,” she soothes, awkwardly. “Your lives here, they’re important. And I ruined everything and put you all in danger and I just thought—I thought you wouldn’t want to see me. So.” She gestures fruitlessly, hands falling back into her lap. _Run_, the voice whispers. _Come on, now’s your moment_. “So I’ll just—”

“Leave. Again.”

She doesn’t reply, fingers going back to fidgeting with the lining of her coat. The silence in Graham’s house is oppressive, without Ryan stumbling around, without the telly blaring quietly. She’s never stayed still long enough to notice it before. Is it always like this, she wonders, when she’s not around to plunge it into chaos? Just quiet and still and peaceful, but not—not peaceful the way houses are sometimes meant to be. It’s peace in the absence of something else—_someone _else—and it makes tears prick at the back of her eyes.

Just another thing that’s her fault, another person she couldn’t save, another way she’s ruined their lives.

“Might be safer,” she says, and her voice only cracks a little. It’s only the truth. There’s no reason that it should hurt. “Might be better, if I just—if I just go.”

The oppressive silence sits between them for a moment.

“Well,” Graham says tiredly, after a minute that could be a century. He rises to his feet with a muffled groan. He doesn’t beg her to stay, and probably she should be glad for it. “I’m not your father. Or your grandfather, for that matter. I can’t keep you from leaving, if that’s really what you want.” He gestures to the bags at his feet. “But I did spend twenty quid on you.”

She glances up at him, uncertain. “I—”

He softens at her expression. It might be pity. She’s not sure anymore. She’s not even sure if she cares, anymore.

“I won’t say you don’t owe us an explanation, Doc,” he says finally, “‘cos you do. And I won’t say I’m not cross, ‘cos I am. But I’m not about to dump a friend out on the street. At least stay here for half a minute.” His brow crinkles. “Were you really sleeping outside?”

At her telling silence, he closes his eyes, grimacing.

“Bleedin’ hell,” he mutters. “Okay, one thing at a time. The talking can wait.” He eyes her warily. “Are you up for a shower? You’re a bit…”

“Crispy?” she offers, when he can’t seem to find something more diplomatic.

“Well, yeah.”

A shower might be lovely, actually, if only to get the soot and the debris out of her hair, but the hallway between the sitting room and the bathroom seems perilously long and her grasp on linear reality is still tenuous at best. Something of her trepidation must catch in her face.

“It’s a shower with a seat,” he offers, extending a hand. “From when I was ill. I couldn’t always—couldn’t always manage. Well, and it’s nice when you’re not up for much else.”

“Sure,” she says, unable to think of a reason to refuse, and she takes his hand. They struggle down the hall together. Her knees stage a coup, and time spits and starts like a lawnmower on the way out, but she’s used to it by now. He leans her against the doorframe and shows her where the towels are and she shudders her way out of her coat and her boots. He takes them with a promise to throw her coat in the wash, and thankfully leaves her to the rest of it.

Normally she’d be rather invested in exploring an aspect of human life that she rarely gets to participate in—the showers on the TARDIS tend to be fairly standard 51st century technology, all sonic bubbles and instant sanitization—but her head is so muggy that she doesn’t even bother to dissect the ingredients list on the shampoo bottle for potentially exciting chemicals. Instead, she sits and slumps against the shower wall and tries not to fall asleep while she rinses the dirt and grime from her hair. The water runs sharp against the abrasions on her face, the burnt away skin on her side, but it’s warm and it’s clean and the 51st century is rather missing out, she thinks fuzzily, on the simple pleasure of hot running water.

It’s that good old mammalian diving reflex, she recalls absently, that makes water on the face feel so nice. Any sort of mammal-like thing that was ever something that might have lived in the water would feel the same. Had the Time Lords ever been water-dwelling? Now there’s a question that would have gotten her in trouble at school. She tries to picture such a thing, but all she can conjure up is the image of a dolphin in a silly hat, only there go her thoughts again, running away from her.

It might be nice, to be a dolphin.

She cleans her hair and herself with lavender-smelling soap in a haze and sits there until the water runs too cold to be comfortable, even for her. Her hands shake embarrassingly as she turns the water off. The mystifying towel-hat thing that she’s seen Yaz walk around in sometimes strikes her as too complicated to attempt, so she settles for scrubbing her hair until the water doesn’t drip from it anymore, scowling at herself in the fogged-up mirror.

She looks bedraggled and half-drowned and scraped up and not at all like someone who’s got a handle on everything. But she does. She’ll let her hair dry and maybe—_maybe_—submit to a cup of tea and then she’ll pull her boots back on and find the source of Sheffield’s ghosts and maybe by the time she’s finished that everyone will have forgotten why they were cross. If she can just avoid them as much as possible until then—

Graham knocks politely on the door. “Doc?”

Her shoulders slump. She scowls one last time at the coward in the mirror and turns to throw her wrinkled clothes back on.

“Doc,” Graham says, knocking again, more insistently. “Brought you some pyjamas, if you like. Thought maybe you’d like the soot out of your t-shirt as well.”

It’s very kind, but it also feels sort of like it might be a trap. She considers her crumpled, grimy clothes on the bathroom floor, nose wrinkling. There is a very faint but unmistakably burnt scent wafting off them that even the lingering smell of lavender soap can’t hide.

“Oh,” she mutters, bending down gingerly to grab them, head spinning at the change in altitude. “_Fine_.”

The door she opens just a hair, because humans are funny about things like that, and sticks her arms out to exchange her pile for a pair of nicely folded pyjamas. “Thanks, Graham,” she says quietly, shivering as the steam escapes.

“No trouble,” he replies through the door.

Which is a lie, probably, but that’s another thing humans are terribly funny about.

He leaves to put her clothes in the wash and she struggles into the pyjamas, resigned. She can’t tell who they belonged to—the intricacies of human gender presentation beyond the occasionally misleading trousers/skirt divide have flummoxed her for centuries, despite her fondness for suits—but they don’t feel very worn and the sleeves are just a hair too long. But it’s kind, she thinks, sinking slowly to the ground on shaky knees as she fumbles with the buttons. It’s terribly kind.

She doesn’t even realize she’s closed her eyes until she comes to again, Graham tapping gently on her cheek. Concern crinkles the lines around his eyes, and a hint of discomfort. He’s crouched down, she realizes blearily, when really he probably shouldn’t be. Human knees don’t come with warranties. Neither do Time Lord knees, for that matter. She remembers what it had felt like, to be so much older, so much less bendy. 

“Sorry,” she croaks, shifting. The warmth of the steam has evaporated with it, and the air is cold and dry again, sharp against her exposed skin.

“You keep passing out,” he says, worried. “And you’re awfully warm for, well—for you. Normally it’s like clasping hands with a glacier.”

She doesn’t feel very warm. She feels—feels—she tries to place it and can’t quite get anywhere beyond an oblique ‘bad’ that she’s doing her very best to ignore.

“Nothing to worry about,” she says. “Just—it’s fine.”

The worry stays but his gaze hardens, though she can’t quite tell what’s made him cross. More cross. Crosser?

“Fine,” he repeats, skeptically. “You fixed Ryan.” His eyes are still lined with discomfort, but he stays stubbornly crouched in front of her. She should find a way up, if only to spare his knees. “Why haven’t you fixed yourself? Why haven’t you done that thing you do, that—that coma?”

“Not much to fix, it’s all skin deep.” Lies, lies. Her skin’s been all but scalded off her ribs, and worse than that, her timeline’s been gouged out like a cat’s paw through Sunday pudding. The last time she’d been hit with a time disruptor—

But that’s a kettle of fish she doesn’t want to touch, and there are ghosts haunting Sheffield, and the TARDIS won’t have her, and—

She doesn’t much fancy the idea of a sleep she can’t wake up from, when the past is unearthed dirt at her feet. Her nightmares give her enough trouble even when she can escape them.

Time heals all wounds. She doesn’t have to hibernate, she just has to _wait_.

“Maybe once the ghosts are taken care of,” she mutters.

“Right. The ghosts.” He’s only humouring her, she can tell. Any other time she might be offended, but she’s far too tired. Everything is spinning and the air is too sharp and she’s being tended to by someone who by all rights should hate her and she can’t even muster the energy to get out of it all. She could fall asleep happily right where she’s sat, only Graham’s fingers tap against her cheek again, his worried eyes swimming in front of her. “C’mon now, Doc, stay with me. Yaz might have been able to carry you, but my back’s not what it used to be.”

“‘M with you,” she mumbles.

“Put some welly into it then,” he says, strained, as he heaves them both upwards. “And give an old geezer a hand.”

“I’m much older than you,” she says, muffled into his shoulder as they stagger back to the sitting room. “Technically speaking.”

“You’re always quick to remind me,” he mutters, helping her back to the sofa. She curls underneath the thin blanket gratefully. “That’s about the only thing we know about you, y’know. That you’re from outer space and about a billion years old.”

At that, he falters. Some of the hardness that had left his face returns to the thin line of his mouth, and he’s cross again. Drawn and weary and cross in the gloom.

“Not quite a billion,” she says softly, but it’s not as funny as she thought it might be. Graham clearly doesn’t think so, by the look of him. She sinks wearily back against the sofa cushions, waiting. 

Afternoon is dwindling, and she aches for a lamp, but doesn’t dare ask.

“What happened on that ship, Doc?” he asks, silhouetted by the weakening sun. His voice is hoarse. “Why did it happen?”

“I—”

Her mouth is terribly dry and her stupid hands won’t stop shaking. There’s no sensible answer she can give that will satisfy him, that will satisfy any of them, and maybe he can see it in her face. His own falls. A hand reaches up to scrape down his cheek, and he shakes his head.

“Later,” he says, brow crinkled, and for a moment he almost looks ashamed, though she can’t imagine why. “Later, it’s no matter now. Get some rest, Doc.”

She opens her mouth in instinctive protest.

“All your things are in the wash,” he counters before she can even say anything. “What are you gonna do, wander about in your pyjamas? Just—” A frustrated sigh escapes him. “I’m not your grandad. I can’t make you do anything. But just stay, Doc. Just for a bit, until we can figure all this out. Promise me.”

The greyness swarms in, and it’s somehow the last thing she wants and the thing she wants the most. She lets her eyes slip closed.

“Just for a bit,” she mumbles, and it’s not a promise. She’s tired of making promises she has no intention of keeping.Guilt curdles in her stomach. Time sways underneath her like a hammock.

Oh, but her dreams won’t be pleasant.

“Just for a bit,” she whispers, giving in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one day I'll write something without any rain, probably, but today is not that day


	5. 5.

Osella is a pristine wilderness, full of swamps and marshes, teeming with life. Osella is a barren wasteland, dry as dust, cracked earth and red dirt. Osella is both of those things and none of those things and all of them at once, because the Time War has finally reached its shores, and now it has been and always will have been everything and nothing.

When her TARDIS crashes down from the fleet onto its surface, she forms a crater in a grassy hill beside a frog-filled swamp. By the time she stumbles out of it, time-sick and choking on smoke, it’s already sand and mud, regressing back into something it might not even have been, and her coat smudges with the red-earth dirt when she falls to the ground. Only she hadn’t been here, had she, her sky-blue sleeves have never touched ruddy, irradiated soil, she’d been grizzled and leather-worn instead and this is a memory-gone-wrong, her past is flung up dirt, she’s remembering all the things she’d decided she was better off forgetting, _someone is digging up her grave_—

“Doctor.” The voice is out of place, out of time.

_She doesn’t belong here_, something whispers.

“Doctor, wake up.”

“I buried it,” she mumbles, and she knows its insensible, she knows that its wrong. Something cold touches her brow and she flinches back from it, into the cushions. “I buried it, why won’t it stay—”

Yaz shushes her gently. “It’s just a dream.”

“There were frogs,” she insists, hardly daring to open her eyes a crack, because what if, what if, “but the soil became too toxic and so they never existed. ” Yaz’s eyes catch golden in the dim light. Someone’s turned on a lamp. “They never even existed.”

A calloused thumb—Yaz has such elegant hands, she forgets sometimes, the work they’ve seen—brushes underneath her eye to sweep away a tear. Hideous embarrassment clambers its way up her throat, but it catches on her chattering teeth, because she doesn’t quite know where to put it. She can’t quite remember why she’s feeling it.

“It’s alright,” Yaz says quietly. Her hair is unpinned, loose by her shoulders, and her head looks bereft, somehow. There should be a braid in there somewhere, she thinks worriedly, shifting against the unnatural cold. Yaz—and that is her name, isn’t it?— without it just looks wrong. Only a semblance of what she should be. “You’re just dreamin’.”

“Oh.” She settles, unmoored. “I’m dreaming you too, then?”

It makes sense. The future leaks through, sometimes, through the cracks they’re putting in the universe. Through time unravelled, through reality ripped apart. He’s lying on a sofa, and she’s lying on the cracked, earthen dirt of a planet that never was, and they were and will have been, just like everything else.

The girl says nothing, hesitant. What had her name been? Ah, well. He’ll learn it again someday. He settles back, relieved, taking the silence for confirmation.

“Oh, good,” he sighs, eyes slipping closed again.

After all. A war is no place for a friend. Even one they haven’t met yet.

—

“—lost it completely—”

“— _ill_, Graham.”

“—well, I know that, I only meant—”

_Awake_ slips and slides in her grasp like soap in the bath. When her eyes flicker open, the soft glow of the lamp is still throwing shadows over Graham’s sitting room, and her friends are muffled silhouettes, hunched over the dining table. Memories that might be dreams tug at her absently. She has the uneasy feeling that this isn’t the first time this evening that she’s woken up.

“She keeps mumbling about having to leave,” Yaz says quietly, sounding exhausted. Her hair sits braided loosely down her back. “What did you say to her, Graham?”

“I asked her to _stay_,” he mutters. Something scrapes across the table. Mug, she identifies, nose twitching at the faint hint of tannins in the air. Beyond that, she doesn’t move.There’s a film over the world. Before, everything had been aching and cold, but now she feels smothered under the quilt tucked around her. Muggy and sick. Her arms are a dead weight, though, and sleep isn’t quite finished with her yet. The promise of it weighs heavy like an anchor.

Ryan rounds out their trio of shadows at the table, thin and tall. He mumbles something that her ears don’t catch.

“—s’alright, then. Why don’t you head on up?” Graham’s voice is edged with concern.

“Someone should stay down here,” Ryan says, quiet. Her hearts pound lighter in her chest at the sound of his voice. Of course, she’d known he was alright, but to hear it, to be sure—

“I will.” Yaz’s shoulders hunch over her mug of tea. “You two should sleep.”

“You don’t have to, love, there’s a guest bed. You’ve got work in the morning.”

“If there’s a guest bed, _I’m_ not the one who should be in it.” Too loud. They all turn to her, watching, and she closes her eyes quickly, keeping her breaths even until the weight of their gazes disappears. In the sudden blackness, sleep pulls and pulls. She struggles against it, ears straining.

Yaz’s voice quiets, chagrined. “I don’t mind, is all. It’s fine.”

“I’d put her up there in a heartbeat, but I’m trying not to scare her off,” Graham says, the sound of him going tinny and dreamlike as consciousness skids away from her. “You weren’t here earlier, it was like herding cats.”

“Maybe she has lost it,” Ryan mutters. No one immediately leaps to her defense, this time, and she’s awake enough still to be slightly offended. “That ship made her crazy.”

Silence sits between them for a moment, like they’re all considering the possibility. Time sweeps and skitters, and in the sweltering dark, she can’t hold on any longer to sense. She lets it sweep her away too, wash her away with the tide.

“— morning,” is one of the last thing she hears as Graham’s chair scrapes as he stands, and it’s as much an ultimatum as anything. “Come on. Getting late.” 

That awful quiet seeps back in, as they leave one by one. She hears Ryan’s uneven footsteps on the stairs as he follows Graham up. There’s a click of the lamp as it gets turned off, and her breath must hitch, because the air stills. Yaz exhales quietly and doesn’t move. For a moment, there’s only silence.

“I know you’re awake.”

The lamp clicks back on.

“You’re afraid of the dark,” Yaz whispers. “Aren’t you.”

She opens her eyes reluctantly. Yaz is golden in the watery glow, more mirage than person. Time eating away at her, like it’s eating away at all of them, but she must be dreaming, still. Maybe she’ll wake up in the desert, to sand sifting away at wind-swept walls, night settled over the whole planet like a blanket, like some terrible promise.

_I was a boy in a barn, once_, she could say, trying to explain. _And in the dark I could only dream_.

But she can only blink, eyelids heavy, and in her own silence she’s failed some sort of test. She can see it in Yaz’s eyes, gleaming gold in the catchlight. The thin, disappointed press of her lips.

The shadows behind Yaz move oddly as she stands there. They drift slowly, shifting like sand, though there’s nothing there to move them, and her arms are weighted down at her side, her tongue leaden in her mouth, her hearts pounding erratically in her throat. The grainy spin of the world has her trapped, and no one will look her in the eye. If she tries to speak, to scream, she knows it will all come out a rasp.

Yaz steps forward, unaware, unconcerned. She crouches down, still hazy and warm, drawn and disappointed in the amber gloom. Her hair hangs loose, spilling down one shoulder.

“I’ll leave the light on,” she whispers, golden, gleaming. “To keep the bad wolf away.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *insert pumpkin emoji*


	6. 6.

“Hey, Doc?”

Warm, watery daylight as she blinks herself awake, but she doesn’t know what time it is. Graham’s sitting room is full of empty, still and quiet. Still and quiet, in violent contrast to the sweeping sound and fury muddying her dreams. She turns her head to him painfully. The air is thick as molasses, and the hiss of the radiator grates against her ears. She catches a glimpse of frost melting on the windows behind Graham, where he’s crouched down between the sofa and the coffee table. A shadow moves behind him, and it’s her imagination, or the curtain, or a tree outside, or—

She doesn’t know what time it is.

“You with me?” he asks quietly, brushing a careful hand against her forehead.

“Last night,” she rasps, flinching back, trying to get her eyes to focus. Sleep drags at her ankles, poison behind her eyelids. “There was something here.”

His lips press together, troubled.

“You’ve been sleeping on and off for two days, Doc,” he says, the skin around his eyes pinched in what might be worry. “No one’s been round but us three. I swear on it.”

At that, she heaves herself upright on instinct, face scrunching, half in panic, half in disbelief.

“Two days?” she breathes, the world sliding queasily out of her grasp as she gropes for a shoulder to lever herself up with. “No, no,” she mutters, as Graham’s worried frown sinks into something more exasperated, and his hands come to still her flailing arms before an elbow can catch him in the face. He steadies her against the back of the sofa, only half-upright, side burning. Something pulls at her skin. Her fingers grasp absently at the dressing she can feel underneath her shirt. “That’s—that’s not—”

“It’s alright,” he tries, one hand raising fruitlessly in reassurance. The other stays clamped onto her upper arm.

“The ghosts,” she struggles her way further upright, white streaking across her line of sight, and she can’t—grab hold of anything, not the time, not the place, not the people— “What time is it?” she begs, suddenly painfully aware of the nothing behind her eyes, of the tangled mess of her timeline, and it’s like blindness, deafness, swimming in the dark—

She reaches a shaking hand for his own, fingers working up, up, until she finds his watch. It ticks under her fingers, certain.

“Half nine,” he tells her, pinched. Deft fingers unfasten the watch from his wrist, press it into her hands without another thought. “Doc—”

Her fingers whiten around it gratefully. She counts the seconds like pearls. Two days, lost in a blink. Time isn’t meant to move around her like that, she’s not meant to lose it, not meant to lose herself in it, it’s too _similar_—

“There was something here,” she insists.

Graham looks at her, his lips still pressed together in a careful sort of sympathy, and it’s not the sort of look she’d received often when she’d been a man, she realizes suddenly, confused, fuming. People had used to look at her with all sorts of emotions, before—usually exasperation, sometimes anger. Confusion, frustration, disbelief. But that odd sort of pity—it’s new. And it’s not Graham’s fault, but the unfairness of it sits sour in her churning stomach. If she had a different face, she finds herself wondering again, half-wishing. If she only had a different face—

But that sits sour too. She’d fought tooth and nail to become what she had. She’d earned this face, she’d _wanted_ it, and it won’t do, to get in the habit of thoughts like that. And perhaps it’s uncharitable to Graham, who has always treated her with the same dignity (or at least an equal amount of exasperation) he extends to all of them. It’s just a fault of human society that she’s never had cause to encounter up close, before, and perhaps that means it’s on her after all.

Still.

_I’m not a woman_, she thinks of reminding him, his watch beating like a heart in her hand. _Not like you think, not like I look_.

“I’m not lying,” she says instead.

“Doc.” His cool hands wrap around her own, white-knuckled. “I don’t think you are. But you—” His brows draw even closer. “You’re not well.” He shifts tacks. “And I don’t know how to help you, unless you tell me.”

Her nose twitches in protest, but he cuts her off before she can say anything.

“None of that,” he insists. “Something’s wrong. Things blow up all the time, and you just jump right back up, running. Tell me how I can help.”

“It’s not—” The fear in his eyes gives her pause, and whatever lie had been swimming in the wings gets swallowed back. “It’s not an easy thing to explain,” she tries instead. “None of it is. I’m not—you wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” he says, so sincere that she almost cracks a smile. But there’s too much space she’s left between them and the mirror is so cracked already that she can’t bear the thought of shattering it any further. The weight of his dislike—and it must still be there, it must still linger, even if he’s trying his best to be kind—sits on her chest, and if she were different—if she were different—better—kinder—

She’d had a hope, once, of finally getting all of it right.

“When I’ve sorted out your ghost problem,” she rasps, avoiding. The watch ticks on quietly, a small comfort. His face falls, just barely. A timeline flits by where she tells him everything, where she cracks herself open, where she gives it all and is forgiven, but it’s not safe, it’s not _safe_, and she lets it pass. She drops the thread. The present chugs on, and the moment writes itself over.

It’ll be easier like this, she reminds herself, as Graham’s face grows more drawn, more cold. She’ll be a stranger again. An alien. And when it’s all wrapped up and they’re all safe in their beds, she’ll leave. Breath on glass. Barely missed.

“I haven’t seen any ghosts, Doc,” he says, brow crinkling.

She draws her hands back into her lap, taking his watch with them.

“There’s something here.” She sets her jaw firmly.

Footsteps, on the carpet, and when she turns her head, Ryan’s silhouette is filling the door frame, phone clenched in hand.

“She’s on to somethin’, Grandad,” he says quietly, nodding his head at her in greeting. “It’s not hit the proper news, but Twitter’s blowing up. Shadows, like she said.” He swallows, shifting nervously, though his face doesn’t change. “People gone missing.”

“Missing?” she interrupts sharply, blood pounding loudly in her ears. “Or just gone?”

Ryan frowns.

“Just gone,” she says, fear behind her teeth, old, old. “No memory, no trace, but it’s not perfect, is it. Extra toothbrushes get left behind. Pairs of shoes that belong to no one. Empty spots in your Christmas photos.” She swallows queasily. “Crumbs. Messy eatin’, is what it is.”

“Well, yeah,” Ryan says slowly. The frown only deepens. “Hold on, do you know what it is?”

“No,” she lies, because the truth won’t do. “I need to have a closer look. I need to—” She braces her hands on the sofa, knuckles still white around the watch. When she can hear the ticking, when it beats in her hand, it’s easier to feel reality as something linear, something real, but she’s still frayed around the edges, hot and sick with poisoned time, and the world tilts as she angles upwards. Graham’s hands keep her from sliding dizzily onto the sitting room carpet.

He shoots a mildly disapproving glance at her, and then at Ryan.

“Later,” he promises, tight-lipped. “It can’t happen right now, Doc, we’ve gotta go out. Once we’re all back, and once you’re a bit steadier on your feet, yeah? Get you some tea. A sandwich, even.”

Her face scrunches into a scowl.

“But—”

“No buts,” he says, with a sternness that could rival Granny Five’s. She settles warily back against the sofa, still scowling.

“I could go out on my own,” she says, and though she tries to temper it, it still comes out half a threat.

“You can’t leave yet,” Graham retorts, in a very reasonable tone of voice. He stands with a wince. “Your coat’s still in the wash.”

Her nose scrunches. “Does laundry usually take this long?”

“You don’t do much of it, do you.”

“Well, no.”

He shrugs, hapless. “It takes as long as it takes, Doc. I don’t know what to tell you. Anyhow, you might as well stick around. We’ll be back later.”

“How much later?” Her free hand snags in the blanket still tangled around her knees. Graham’s sitting room, already far more empty than it should be, looms with space. Preemptive absence. “Are you running errands? I love a good errand. I could come. It might be dangerous, out there.”

Graham and Ryan share a look that she can’t decipher.

“No offense, Doc,” Graham says, delicately, though it’s really not his strong suit, and she has half a mind to say it. “But right now it looks like a mild breeze could knock you over. We won’t be gone long.”

“And besides,” Ryan adds, leaning against the door frame, a familiar smile spreading across his face that can’t mean anything good. “You won’t be alone.”

—

Her tea is missing all of the sugar cubes that Graham usually stirs in for her resentfully, but she can feel the tannins working, fortifying her cells. The mug still shakes as she brings it to her lips, but it’s just a matter of time. It’s just, she thinks stubbornly, shivering balefully under the weight of the blanket around her shoulders, a matter of _time_.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit down?” she asks again, a bit skeptically as Yaz’s gran makes her way falteringly from the kitchen to the sitting room, a plate of biscuits balanced in one hand. Her wheelchair sits parked in the front hall, a stubborn monument.

“I’ll sit down,” Umbreen declares, placing the biscuits just out of reach, “when I feel like it.” She walks slowly over to Graham’s favourite armchair, currently vacant, glancing over her shoulder with a steely glare. “I refuse to be treated like an invalid in my own home, let alone somebody else’s.”

“Right, it’s just—”

Her lips close around the next part, because if she’s learned anything over the centuries, it’s that there’s no delicate way of saying ‘_you’re getting on a bit_’ to a human without risking a slap. Even if it’s just a statement of fact.

“Going to an awful lot of trouble,” she mutters instead, feeling half-asleep still. Confused. Rightfully so, in her defense, if only because these two parts of her friend’s lives don’t tend to overlap. “For a stranger.”

Umbreen seats herself in the armchair, slowly but surely. She turns her glare back in the Doctor’s direction. “I might be old and frail,” she says, stern and utterly serious. “But I never forget a face. _Doctor_. You and I are hardly strangers.”

A chill dampens the back of her neck. “I don’t know what you mean,” she says, taking a shaking sip of her sugarless tea, turning her gaze to the coffee table before it can give away too much of her panic.

_Yasmin Khan_, she thinks, too tired to be resentful. Too tired to finish the thought.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Umbreen continues, reaching to retrieve her own cup of tea from the table, wizened fingers straining. She sips at it delicately. Her gaze is cold on the side of the Doctor’s face. “If I didn’t owe you a debt, I’d be terribly angry with you.”

“You don’t owe me a thing.”

The tea is bitter at the back of her throat, suddenly. Too sharp. She sets her mug down, feeling queasy. Tea with the past, set up shop in Graham’s living room. She’s not awake enough yet for any of it to feel real. Everything is still spinning. Weak daylight is struggling through the curtains.

“I owe you more than you can imagine, I think.” Umbreen takes another sip of tea, calmly. Nonchalant. “Which is why I’m doing this favour for my favourite grandchild. She seems to be under the impression that without some kind of supervision, you’ll be inclined to disappear.”

“No offense, but if I wanted to leave, it’s not like you could do very much to stop me.”

She makes the mistake of meeting Umbreen’s gaze. One eyebrow raises in challenge. She glances away, cowed.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” she mutters, though it sounds petulant even to her own ears. Out of the corner of her eye, something moves. She refuses to look at it, hearts throbbing stupidly in her throat. “I should be out there. With them, at least.” Her knuckles whiten in the fabric of the quilt, around Graham’s watch. It could be anything. A curtain shifting. Something outside, moving past the window. A tree branch, blowing in the wind.

Whatever it is, Umbreen doesn’t see it. Or if she does see it, she doesn’t care. Her eyes narrow, when the Doctor finally raises her head to look.

“They made plans before you got here,” she says simply. “Life goes on, whether you’re here or not, you know. It doesn’t stop when you arrive.”

“I—”

Any protests die on her lips.

“I know,” she says quietly, looking down into her lap. Into her stupid, shaking hands. “I know.”

She swallows back the urge to glance at the door. To make for it on stumbling legs and disappear. Instead she drags a palm down her face and wipes the cold sweat from her eyes, feeling wrung out and hung to dry. Silly, because Graham’s sitting room is too full of watery light to be as terribly foreboding as she’s convinced it ought to be. Brittle and hot and prickly, too. _Human_, she thinks a bit darkly, allowing herself just a moment—a _moment_—of spite. The constitution of Time Lords doesn’t lend itself to frailty. It lends itself to survival. Survival at all costs, against all odds, against all petty inconveniences—

But the war, she thinks tiredly, leaning back against the sofa, sweat-damp hair falling into her eyes. The war had proved that survival had its limits. That all the odds and petty inconveniences were nothing in the face of time itself, used against the very beings that been the first to try to wield it. A good bit of irony, really.

If you liked that sort of thing.

“Aren’t you going to drink your tea?” Umbreen asks, in a direct change of subject that sounds more like an order than a question.

“I’ve had enough,” she mutters, which is rude, probably, though it also happens to be the truth.

Umbreen rolls her eyes, and for a moment, her resemblance to the young spitfire of a woman she’d met in the Punjab is far too easy to see.

“I didn’t live to be this age by sitting around moping,” she says sharply, reaching down for a box at her feet, unearthed from under the armchair. “Bring your tea over here. If you can lay there and complain, you can stumble over here and help me with this jigsaw.”

“All of Sheffield is in danger, presumably, possibly the entire world, or even the universe—and you want me to help you with your jigsaw,” she says skeptically.

Umbreen only raises an eyebrow.

“Right, well,” she mumbles, steeling herself to stand on shaky knees. “Alright, then.”

—

Evening falls as their jigsaw slowly gets completed. As the Doctor absently places the last piece where it belongs, Umbreen rises and totters over alarmingly to switch on a lamp. A sickly sweet cottage scene glistens in the warm light, complete.

She reaches deep for any sort of satisfaction, but it doesn’t come. Inside, she finds nothing but a queasy mixture of boredom and unease. Umbreen glances down at it, unreadable.

“Well,” she says, considering. “That’s much quicker than they normally take me. You’re rather more patient than either of my granddaughters, Doctor. They tend to abandon me halfway through.”

She sounds surprised about it.

“I can be _patient_.” The Doctor wrinkles her nose. “Not like there was anything else to do, the whole day,” she mutters, probably a bit uncharitably. No wonder all the elderly people she’s met tend to be on the grouchy side of things. If she were too old and frail to do anything but sit around doing jigsaws all day, only to—she winces as Umbreen slides their painstakingly crafted work back into the box it came from—wipe them clean every evening, well. She can’t imagine. Her head is even more full of fog than it had been when she’d woken up. “They’re a bit pointless, aren’t they. Jigsaws.”

Umbreen raises an eyebrow as she lowers herself carefully back into the dining chair.

“I always thought that was rather the point. To make something with your own hands and then destroy it. A good lesson for the very young. And the very old,” she mutters quietly. “It’s about impermanence. Nothing lasts, Doctor.”

Behind Umbreen, through the window, the rain has stopped and the clouds have parted. A sheet of night, through the glass. Very dark all of a sudden, she notes. Their afternoon feels like it’s barely lasted a second. The click of the lamp had been just in time.

“Not beauty,” Umbreen continues, ignoring her absent gaze. “Not pain. Not even you.”

The back of her neck chills.

“Nothing lasts,” Umbreen says, and when the Doctor tears her gaze away from the window, her eyes are endless void. “But I do.”

She stumbles from her chair so quickly that it clatters to the ground, hearts railing up her throat.

There’s a jigsaw piece on the floor beneath the table. Umbreen rises from her chair to pick it up with none of the frailty of before. It glistens warmly in her hand. The Doctor backs away to the entrance to the hall, pulses hammering in her ears. Graham’s watch glints in the light, where she’s left it on the table. Without it, she can feel reality start to spiral out from underneath her.

“No,” she whispers.

“You made me with your own hands,” it says, eyes shiny and black, using Umbreen’s face like a mask. “But you couldn’t destroy me.”

Fear and nausea rise in her throat to settle behind her teeth. There’s no sense to be had, here. She’s only a boy in a barn, alone in the dark. She shakes her head, tears gathering behind her eyes.

“No, no,” she hisses, air caught tight in her throat, and there’s no breath to scream, no breath to sob. Before she can think, she’s bolting for the door, slipping down the rain-soaked steps to the house, slimy brick, hands catching in the dirt of Graham’s flower beds. She reels to her feet, running. The rain has stopped, but the empty street is still shiny with water, glinting with the faint streetlight, the barest hint of moon.

The dimmest, barest hint of moon.

She skids to a halt, neck prickling, hearts still slamming in her chest.

She looks up.

“No,” she says.

Far above and far away and far too close, she watches the stars blink out. One by one by one. She feels them disappear from reality, unwrite themselves from the universe, unravel one by one by one by one, _consumed_—

“No!” Her knees give out from underneath. Rain soaks into the fabric of her pyjama trousers. Behind her, when she glances back, the thing wearing Umbreen is silhouetted in Graham’s window, black as void against the warm glow of the sitting room lamp, and—

“Doc?”

Fingers tap gently at her cheek. Graham’s face swims blearily into view, late afternoon tepid through the window. Rain drizzles against the glass. There’s a crick in her neck, from where she’s fallen asleep sitting up, and a blanket in her lap.

“Sorry,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “Only you were muttering, a bit.”

For a moment, all she can register is the pounding of her hearts in her throat.

“You’re back,” she says hoarsely, swallowing.

“And about time. Proper winter out there, it’s cold as hell.” His face crinkles into a mild frown. “Did you sleep all day?”

“No,” she protests, though it’s not especially vehement. “We did a…”

Her eyes fall on the half-completed jigsaw littering the dining room table.

“Jigsaw,” she finishes. Across from her in Graham’s arm-chair, Umbreen is quietly knitting. “I—”

At her shudder of breath, his hand gets in the way of her vision again, cool, dry knuckles against her forehead. She leans back into the sofa, nose wrinkling.

“Fever’s up.” The hand withdraws. “Always worse in the evening,” he says. “Or at least, that’s what Grace used to tell me.”

Her face drops into a scowl at his familiar dismissal, but she lets him fuss for a moment, watching Umbreen behind him, Ryan as he brings plastic bags through to the kitchen. Evening is beginning its slow descent, darkening sky against the hiss and rattle of the radiator. Umbreen absently clicks the lamp beside the armchair on, and when their eyes meet briefly over Graham’s head, hers are free of void, clear and sharp.

It doesn’t make sense.

Muffled panic sits at the bottom of her throat, fizzling slow. None of them are safe like this, is all she can think, not while her timeline is so tangled, not while her own thoughts are so scattered. Not while none of them will believe the danger they’re in.

Graham finally leaves her to help Ryan in the kitchen, and Umbreen is focused, intent on her knitting. Just to be sure, just to be certain, just to be careful, she swallows queasily and pinches Umbreen’s timeline between delicate, metaphysical fingers. Inspecting.

There’s nothing amiss. She frowns. It’s all perfectly in place, no paradoxes, no temporal hernias. A few fixed moments in time, as there should be, but it’s all—

Protected, she realizes, a chill raising the hair on the back of her neck. Because there are black flecks at the edges, at the frayed little ends, where something has tried to eat through her life, her history, but it’s all been reinforced. A timeline made inedible, unpalatable, when Umbreen’s twisted, vibrant, complex existence should have been incalculably tempting.

It should be impossible.

“You’ve been made a fixture,” she mutters, too quietly to be heard, if anyone was even listening. Umbreen’s knitting needles clack through the empty space, mingle with the boil of the kettle leaking through from the kitchen. “A steel rod through the middle of reality, but why—”

The front door creaks open gently behind her. Cold air brushes her cheeks, before she hears it close. She waits, quiet dread building in her throat, listening for the absent shuffle of boots being unlaced, a plastic vest being hung up to dry.

“Doctor,” Yaz says, stepping through the door frame, glancing towards her grandmother fondly. Her eyes catch warm in the light, unmistakably brown. “Is everything alright?”


	7. 7.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (bold of me to assume I was going to be able to post all of this before halloween rip)

Everything is fine. If she keeps telling herself that, then maybe it will speak itself out into the universe.

She sits queasily through dinner, takeaway from the local Chinese and more tea, always tea. Graham says nothing as she stirs in more sugar cubes than she cares to count. She sips at it, treacly down her throat as she ignores the plate in front of her.

It’s all connected. Unless she’s dreaming. Yaz and Umbreen and the man in the alley and she’s seen this sort of thing before, really, whole towns eaten away until they’d never existed in the first place, sand and dust and children’s shoes left behind, whole planets swallowed up and only shoelaces to remember them by, but the Earth—

The Earth she’d always managed to pinch between her fingers. Sometimes whole galaxies had been served for supper at her hand, because dogs and children alike had to be fed, but not the Milky Way, never, not a chance, and she’s never been a good enough man to regret it and she never will be and she’ll do it again and again and as many times as she has to, in as many realities as she has to—

A hand at her shoulder. She glances up at—at the girl. Dark eyes. All humans look a bit the same, just a line in the dark, forward and forward and forward.

“I’ve unspooled you,” she says, despairing, because the girl’s line is a circle. Red thread, split like a Cerberus, all serpent heads without end. Another victim of the war. “Do I have to—do I have to eat these wiggly lines?”

“No,” Dark Eyes says, a worried shine to her gaze. Her voice is firm. Yaz, she’s called. The present snaps to rights, and it’s the pulse in the hand on her shoulder that’s set everything straight in a line again. “No, you don’t have to eat the noodles.”

“I think I’m a vegetarian,” she mumbles, and upon further inspection of the thought, she supposes it might be the truth. She sometimes has been. Maybe right now she is.

“There’s no meat in these,” Yaz says gently, but the plate gets removed from in front of her anyway, by some hands attached to a body she can’t see.

She feels her brow crease. “Then what are the squiggly lines made out of?”

“Wheat.” Yaz has a specific tone of voice she uses when she’s trying to be patient. Frustration leaks out around it, like poorly sealed paint.

“Wheat?” Graham’s watch pounds a staccato in her tightly clenched hand. “There’s still wheat,” she wonders. “You won’t be able to grow it much longer.” She blinks, having the distinct impression that her mind has wandered rather too far off. _Spoilers_, something warns. _Don’t give them too much_. “You’ll have to make—different things into wiggly lines. Yaz, there’s something—”

The hand on her shoulder tightens.

“I know.” Yaz’s mouth is close to her ear, against the warm hum of other conversation. If she could only see—well, if she could only keep track—it’s only that dinner is a dizzying mess of potentialities, styrofoam containers passed and spilled and a microcosm of decisions made, and if she looks at it all at once she’ll drown in it. “We’ll talk in a minute. I’m going to help Graham with the dishes.”

A minute could be an hour could be a second. It’s all squished together sick at the back of her head, but the watch is a lifeline. She lets it tick in a straight line and tries to pull the pieces of herself back together. Yaz. Umbreen. The man in the alley. Children’s shoes. That thin, thin line between awake and asleep. Her side throbs. How much of it is real? How much of it might be a nightmare? If she could only _see_ it—

Yaz slides into the chair beside her. The Doctor blinks harshly, narrowing in on the real and the now, and realizes muggily that everyone else has vacated the kitchen. The dishes are in the sink. The bin behind them is crammed full of aluminium containers.

Yaz isn’t looking at her. Her hands are twined around each other, placed in front of her on the table.

“If I’d known you were badly hurt,” she says quietly, “I wouldn’t have left. I’m sorry.”

“W—” Her lips open and close around the unexpected. She blinks. “Yaz, you don’t have to apologize to me, I’m the one that—”

She tightens her free hand around her mug of tea, trailing off.

“I meant to drop you off at the right moment,” she mutters finally. “I really did.”

“I know.” Yaz’s voice is still poorly sealed paint, upset drawn in the line of her mouth. She looks tired, in the light. All the wonder’s been sucked out of her. Is it Graham’s house that’s done it, still? The empty space in it, the reminder of that straight line into the dark. “It’s fine. It’s just—why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you—”

In another moment, another thread, the words don’t get bitten off. In this one they do, and reality clangs through loudly. _Why weren’t you alright?_ That’s the implication, that’s what’s left unsaid. For the better, maybe, because she doesn’t have an answer.

Yaz shakes her head, more to herself. She turns, her chair screeching briefly against the kitchen tile.

“You’re not gonna explain what happened on that ship,” she says, eventually. “Are you.”

Another tipping moment, another uncut thread. She could answer differently. But if she’s going to leave, she should leave with herself intact, leave with as much of the lie as she can bear.

“Bit complicated,” she says, reaching for the part of her that isn’t scattered and exhausted. “That’s all, and a bit boring, really. Long story. And I love a good long story, me, but there’s far better ones out there, believe me. Far too much temporal physics for the likes of you lot, you’re better off without it.” Her breath hitches. If it weren’t such an effort to ramble, it’d feel like slipping on a pair of comfortable shoes. “Can I have a biscuit?”

Yaz only stares at her for a good long moment. Disappointed. “You know, you never stop talking,” she says. “But you never really say anything.”

She swallows. “Yaz,” and there’s no feigning the urgency in her voice. “There’s something—”

“I know there’s something,” she snaps. “Or at least you think there’s something, that’s not—”

“Are you alright?”

That gives her pause. Her brows draw into a frown.

“What do you mean? Course I am.” The frown deepens. “Why?”

“You’re sure you haven’t seen anything weird? Felt anything? Anything at all.” She leans forward. “Please. It could be important.”

“I haven’t,” she starts, half-sighing. But her mouth closes tightly. “I’ve been havin’ bad dreams,” she admits finally. Quiet. “That’s all.” But she frowns again at the Doctor’s hiss of breath, at the twist of her face. “Oh, just—would you stop? Not everything is alien. Not everything is something terrible about to happen. Sometimes,” she says, brittle, like she’s had to come to the realization herself, “everything is perfectly ordinary.”

The Doctor watches for any hint of gold in her gaze, any suggestion of the unnatural, but her eyes are perfectly brown. Perfectly normal. Perfectly exhausted.

“You look tired,” she tries to say delicately, hearts pounding. “That’s all.”

Yaz only scoffs, shaking her head. Her perfectly pinned away hair doesn’t budge. “I can’t believe you.” She raises her eyebrows for emphasis. “You’re one to talk. You look terrible.”

“I’m fine,” she protests. “Much better now.”

Yaz shakes her head again, irritated, and it makes something twist in her gut, some sourness reaching for an exit. No one will look her in the eye, no one will believe a word of what she says.

“Oh, come on. Would you just stop?” she demands.

“Stop what?” Yaz’s eyes flash. “Stop—what, stop caring?” Her gaze darts away, lips flattening into a silent fume. She swallows, carefully.

Neither of them apologize. The silence spreads to fill the space between them, sour, as precious seconds flit by.

“I have to take Nani home,” she says eventually. Short.

She leaves, silently. The Doctor listens for the low hum of conversation, the squeak of Umbreen’s wheelchair and her quiet protests and she and Yaz exit into the rain.

“Well,” Graham says, a silhouette in the kitchen doorway. “That could have gone better, yeah?”

She turns to wrinkle her nose at him, irritated.

“Oh, come on,” he says, walking towards her, jacket in hand. “None of that. She’s had a hard week.”

“I know.”

“She looks up to you, innit. That’s why this is so difficult.”

“Looked up,” she corrects, gaze moving to her own feet.

“Maybe.” He moves closer. “But I’m not so sure. It’s not so simple as all that, Doc.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Nah. It’s hard here, for her. Things aren’t so easy as they are for me and Ryan, we just slot back in, we’re used to being boring. And we’ve got each other.” His brow crinkled. “But she needs something more, or she’ll wither.”

She frowns, shifting in her seat. The rain pelts against the windows, behind her. “What are you trying to say?”

“You’re going to leave, after all this is done with. Aren’t you?”

She shifts in her seat again. “Isn’t that what you want?”

“Ah.” Graham reaches down to clap her gently on the shoulder. His hand lingers to help her to her feet. “See, now you’re at least asking.”

—

Graham’s car is old and worn and smells strongly of the stale air freshener dangling from the mirror. Wrapped in an old coat and a scarf that Graham had insisted on, being blasted by the heater in the back, the effect is more stifling than it is cozy. Sheffield whirls by out the window, drizzly with rain and streaky lights. The slow path. The watch still clutched in her left hand ticks away, counting out seconds. In the dark and the heat and the silence and the world outside rushing by, she could almost fall asleep again. Maybe that had been Graham’s plan all along, she thinks for just a moment, half-paranoid. Maybe that’s why he’d agreed.

“Left up here,” Ryan murmurs from the passenger seat, his face softly illuminated by the glow from his phone.

The car veers tentatively, and she watches Ryan cover up a wince. She doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to poor driving (or poor parking, for that matter), but she gets the distinct sense that Graham is perhaps better suited to being behind the wheel of a bus. With a rumbling moan, the engine goes still.

Graham sighs, flexing his hands around the steering wheel. “You’re sure about this, Doc?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder. “You don’t exactly—”

She whips the sonic out and brandishes it pointedly.

“I said I needed a closer look,” she says.

“Right, but—”

“So I’m _taking a closer look_.”

Ryan pauses in the act of opening the passenger side door and takes a moment to massage the bridge of his nose. “Could we all,” he suggests, “stop having a go at each other for five minutes, maybe?”

He lurches out of the car without another word, towards the grim-looking cafe he’d scoped out on Twitter. Graham sighs again.

“Sorry,” she mutters, keeping the sonic out, tightly clenched in her hand.

“Come on,” is all he says, following. She clambers unsteadily out of the car after them, squinting at the tired brick building in front of them. Grimy windows below a faded neon sign beckon them inside.

“Cheers,” Graham says with a frown. “This place looks like a health-code violation waiting to happen.”

“Only one way to find out.”

She limps determinedly into the cafe, weaving, but with purpose. Graham and Ryan follow closely behind.

“Well?” Ryan asks in a poorly-managed whisper as they shuffle in past the creaking door. “What’s the verdict?”

“The sonic needs to calibrate,” she hisses back, eyeing the worn interior. The sonic almost isn’t necessary. It’s funny, really. Now she knows what she’s actually looking for, the signs are all there. Time, at a twist and bend. An extra apron hanging behind the counter. Photographs with no one in them. “It’s been here,” she whispers, a hand trailing against the rough stucco as she ventures further inside. Her footsteps are loud and echo with a faint sucking noise against the sticky lino, but the woman behind the counter doesn’t look up from her magazine. “I can feel it.”

“Doctor,” Ryan whispers loudly again. “What’s ‘it’? You still haven’t said.”

“How can it be here?” she mutters, fingers scraping more forcefully against the wall. “It can’t be. It’s not possible, it must be somethin’ else. I’m—”

“Doctor.”

She claws fruitlessly at the stucco as her knees give out beneath her, the cheeky buggers. Stronger hands catch her under the armpits.

“Alright,” a calm voice says, though for some reason she knows the calm is just a mask. “I think we’d better sit, yeah?”

“I’ll grab the coffee,” the other voice mutters, not sounding particularly happy about it.

“It’s alright, Jaimie,” she mumbles, as she’s pulled towards a table and shoved gently into a booth. She frowns. “No, Turlough. Fitz. Ian? _Ryan_.”

Ryan gazes across the booth at her, looking unsettled.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you got there.”

She fumbles with the sonic, placing it on the sticky table in front of them. “Sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Gramps was right. We shouldn’t be out here.”

“This whole place is riddled with temporal moth holes,” she protests.

“Yeah, and they’re clearly not doin’ you any favours,” he points out. Graham joins them, sliding indelicately in beside him with two steaming mugs of coffee in hand. He slides one towards her, looking trepidatious.

“Giving you anything with this much caffeine seems like a poor idea on a good day,” he mutters, as she takes a scowling sip. “Look, Doc, I understand wanting to figure this out, if you think there really is something going on here. But after, won’t you let me take you back to the TARDIS? I’ve nothing that can help you, but it must have. You could—you could go to a space hospital or something.”

“Space hospital?” She twists her head to look at him disbelievingly. “Well, to be fair, I suppose we have technically visited one. Speaking of hospitals in space, do you remember when that one in London got trapped on the moon? That was me. Well, I say it was me. It was actually a bunch of police rhinos from space, but I _did_ get it back to Earth in mostly one piece.”

“_Doc_.”

“I won’t lounge about the TARDIS while Sheffield’s in danger,” she almost snaps. “Besides, _she’s _still sensitive to temporal disturbances and right now I’m like a—like a kidney stone.”

“A kidney stone.”

“Yes. That’s why we don’t go messing about with temporal weapons, that’s a rule, you should—you should write that down.” She fumbles, throat going sour. There’s no point in them writing down any rules anymore, is the thing. “It’s fine, though. Used to it, almost. Solid five out of ten. Six out of ten, at a push.”

Ryan’s brow wrinkles. He leans forwards, hands around his coffee. “Wait. _Temporal_ weapons. And you said this thing is eating people out of time. Are they related, all that stuff on the ship and what’s happening here?”

_No_, she wants to say. _No, because that would be impossible. No, because that would mean the end of everything_. 

“I don’t know,” she says instead, dodging. “I just need—” She swallows uncomfortably. “I need proof. Proof of what we’re dealing with, and I can’t trust my own head.”

It’s not a comfortable thing to admit out loud. There’s so much doubt in their faces to begin with, but it’s only the truth.

“Alright,” Graham says, watching. “Fair enough.” He puts his hand out on the table, face up. “So what needs doing?”

Her nose wrinkles. “Graham—”

“I mean it,” he insists. “I can point and think as well as the next bloke. Let me have a look round.”

“It might not be safe,” she warns. “I can’t let you.”

“Whatever’s here has moved on.” His fingers wiggle insistently. “Come on, now. Enough stumbling around, the both of you. The sooner we get this done with, the sooner we can get back home. Call the Midwife’s on tonight.”

There’s a look in his eyes that she can’t read.

“If he misses it, he’ll be unbearable,” Ryan mutters, giving her a look.

Her lips press together. She drops the sonic into his waiting hand. “Be careful,” she says. “It’s calibrating on the right setting already. Just need to wave it about a bit, really, stick it into corners.”

“See, now that I can do,” he replies, standing smartly. “Back in a moment. Don’t get into any trouble.” He tips his hat at them with his free hand. As he wanders off, she watches worriedly, hands snaking back around her cup of coffee. There’s not quite enough sugar in it to make it palatable.

“Is this what it feels like?” she asks Ryan. “Being left in the car.”

He presses his lips together in acknowledgement. “Cheers, mate.” He clinks their coffee mugs together listlessly. “Welcome to the club.”

“Don’t think I’m a big fan of the club.”

The look he gives her is unimpressed.

“Sorry,” she mutters. He shakes his head, but there’s a hint of something strange in his eyes. His gaze keeps drawing back to her. Well—not to her, actually, she realizes.

“This coat,” she ventures, guessing. A hint of familiar perfume lingers under her nose, soaked stale into the fabric of the coat like a ghost. “Did it belong to Grace?”

Underneath the table, Ryan’s foot is jostling, full of restless energy. His face is harder to read. “Yeah,” he says, after a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

Her eyes fix on the hanging apron, past Ryan’s head and the vinyl booth and the waitress behind the front counter. It’s a bit different, being haunted by what never was. There’s something solid to Grace’s absence. Her existence is an anchor for their grief.

Whoever belonged to that apron is worse than dead. All the people that loved them won’t have any anchor at all. They’ll be haunted by nothing.

_You made me with your own hands_, something whispers at the back of her head.

“Doctor,” Ryan says. “What’s a time war?”

She’s snapped out of her thoughts.

“Ryan—” she starts. He leans forward, terribly sincere. So serious, when he wants to be, and usually it’s something about him that she admires.

“Is that where you keep going?” he asks. “When you drift off. When you’re dreaming.”

“No,” she says tightly. “I stay right here. The Time War is over.”

“Not what I meant.” He leans back. The vinyl squeaks as he shifts. “So what those blokes on the ship were saying is true, then.” He frowns. “You were a soldier.”

“I wasn’t anything.”

“That’s why you’ve gone all mad and weird. No offense,” he adds, still frowning. Oblivious to the twitch of her tightly pressed lips. “Why didn’t you say anything? Before, I mean.”

“It’s not,” she tries, nausea rising up her throat. The glass is shattering and she’s trapped in a vinyl booth. “It’s not quite—”

“Why did the TARDIS bring us there?”

“It was an accident,” she hisses, palms flattening against the table, fingers trembling. The caffeine buzzing in her brain isn’t helping. “Just an accident, she was just following old protocols, I would never have taken you anywhere near that place if I had known.”

Ryan raises a hand to soothe, eyes widening in alarm. “Woah, woah. Yeah, I know. I get it. But—where was it, though? Why were you the only one that could do anything about it?”

She can only shake her head, swallowing tightly.

“Oh, come on,” he tries. “Got blown up for the trouble, least you could do is let me know _why_.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, spit sour behind her aching teeth. He shakes his head again.

“Don’t need to keep saying it. It’s just—”

Her eyebrows knit together in confusion. “I am sorry, though.”

“I know,” he says simply. “I believe you. I—accept your apology, or whatever.”

“You’re saying that, but your face is saying somethin’ different.”

He scowls across at her.

“Don’t ruin the moment.”

“It’s what I’m best at.”

He leans back in his booth with a sigh, coffee still clenched in his hands. Drawn and tired.

“I’m not cross, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s just—” He tilts forward until his elbows are resting on the table. “We’re your friends, yeah? Your family, even.”

Her mouth has gone dry. It’s harder to say than she would have thought.

“Yeah,” she says finally, full of false cheer. “My fam. Definitely. Sure.”

“Right,” he says skeptically, frowning across. “Okay, see—”

“Team, even. _Squad_.”

He sours. “You keep your distance, Doctor.”

She swallows. Shame starts a familiar slow crawl up her throat.

“To keep you safe,” she says.

“Yeah,” he allows. “Maybe. To keep yourself safe, too, though. Trust me, I get it.” His fingers tighten around his mug. “But family have to trust each other.” He takes a breath. “That ship—”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, obviously. But how are we meant to understand, if you don’t?”

“I’m allowed a past,” she insists. “I’m allowed my own secrets, Ryan. The things that I’ve done—”

“_Don’t matter to us_.” He takes a breath in through his nose. “We care about who you are. Not what you’ve done. We’re meant to help. That’s what family’s for, innit.”

“I suppose,” she allows, coffee steaming up her nose. She considers for a moment. “It’s just—you wouldn’t understand. There’s no one left in the universe who understands,” she says, and it’s more truth than she expected. She’s not the last of her own kind, anymore. If she wanted, if she could stand it, her own people are there waiting, at the end of it all. But the truth of it remains.

There’s not a person like her in the entire universe.

Sometimes, that fact is exhilarating. Sometimes, it means nothing at all, as it probably should. Right now, in this minute, this moment, it’s only terribly lonely. Loving isn’t knowing, after all. She might be loved, but she won’t ever be understood, and it’s a trap of her own making.

A trap of her own making, and the only escape she can think of is to leave.

“You mean,” Ryan says, slow realization dawning in his eyes. A terrible suspicion. “You mean, there’s none of your own people left.”

“It’s a long story,” she says, quietly, firmly.

“Your family,” he starts, looking stricken and ill.

“They’re never far.” She leans forward, elbows on the table, one finger tapping at her temple. Smiling, as best she can. “They’re just in here. Just like Grace.”

Her eyes catch on the empty apron again. The listless, uneasy gaze of the waitress still absorbed in her magazine.

“They all have the privilege of memory,” she says softly, hearts pounding. Terrible old guilt, so wide and deep and ancient she can hardly bear to look at it all at once, like the expanse of a lake welling up inside. “Which is why I’ve got to stop this, before it’s too late.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story keeps meandering to strange little places, but I'm not feeling organized enough this month to wrangle it, so sorry for the unpredictable posting schedule! That's what I get for making any sort of plan.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading and I'd love to know what you thought!


	8. 8.

She dozes on the way home, lulled half-way into sleep by the suffocating heat of Graham’s car, the quiet moan of its engine, the tick of Graham’s watch clutched in her hand. The sonic sits safe in her pocket. It’s only confirmed what she doesn’t want to know.

_You made me with your own hands_.

She keeps waiting for it all to be revealed as some elaborate nightmare, something cooked up by her own brain. It all has the feel of a dream, is the thing. There are threads she hasn’t followed back yet, there’s a logic, some connection that she hasn’t found, because she’s _stupid_. It makes sense, but it doesn’t. There are pieces of the jigsaw missing, still.

Her head stills against the seat, eyes wandering to the scenery blurring past. Graham pulls to a halting stop at a traffic light. The light pollution in human cities of this era makes it hard to spot the galaxies above, but she still instinctively grasps for them, aches for the stars like she always has, ever since she was a boy.

That desert sky had always been clear and perfect, the light and smog from Gallifrey’s cities sealed away by glass. A perfect marmalade sky, dark and burnt by the night, dotted with constellations that he’d grown to know by hearts.

What sort of stars might there be, she wonders, at the end of the universe?

Graham taps two fingers against the steering wheel, impatient. She gazes with half-lidded eyes at the empty sky above. If she really looks, if she squints her eyes, past the smog and the smoke and the tinge of the light—

Well, there’s nothing at all.

She gasps awake, head jolting against the car window.

“Alright, Doc?” Graham asks, peering back over his shoulder at her. At Ryan’s nudge, he twists back around and brakes for the same traffic light. “Nearly there.”

She takes in a shuddering breath.

“Can you turn down the heat?” she asks, knuckles whitening around the watch. Her grandfather’s watch. Only that’s not right, is it, because Time Lords had no need for watches except as rather ironic masks for chameleon arches, and her grandfather—her grandfather—

She can’t see Graham frown, but she can hear it in his voice.

“It’s not turned on at all, Doc,” he replies. “Heater broke last winter.”

“I keep trying to get him to let me have a look at it,” Ryan starts, exasperated, but the rest of his words blur together. The watch ticks like a heartbeat in her hand. She scrunches her eyes closed and opens them again, twisting to the window. The seatbelt strains against her shoulder.

Outside, against the glare of evening lights, the orange smog floating above the buildings and trees, the night is empty and long and void and the stars blink out one by one by one.

And the sky tears open, time spilling out like poison—

She gasps awake, head jolting against the car window.

“Alright, cockle?” Graham asks, twisting back to glance at her. His eyes crinkle kindly, but they’re filmy with concern. “We’re nearly there, yet.”

—

The space between one moment and the next is all but indistinguishable, now. She blinks, and she’s somewhere different. Blinks, and eternity or a second might have passed. The time piece in her hand ticks on, red marks on her palm from the strength of her grip.

_You made me with your own hands_. It’s such a constant refrain that she could almost use it to keep the time, if time were the sort of thing that could be kept. It’s adorable, really, that humans even try. To think that something as tiny as a watch could contain something spanning more dimensions than humans have eyes for—

Adorable. Or brave, maybe.

Yaz passes her a mug full of the liquid with the tannins and she nearly spills it in her lap. Even that warm gaze is no match for the lazy spin of the world as it jolts from one second to the next.

“Careful,” Yaz says, calloused hands wrapping around her own. Her hair spills down her back, untamed. “You’ve got to be careful, Doctor.”

“I’m careful,” she protests, as the mug steadies in her hand. “I—”

But she blinks, and Yaz is a silhouette in the lamplight, arms crossed, shoulders tense. She’s skidding from moment to moment like a child on roller skates. Her stomach turns.

“You good?” Ryan asks, from his perch on Graham’s armchair, elbows resting on his knees. The sonic is in his hands, held gingerly to a ridiculous extent, if she’s honest. Though it’s true that the point and think feature in careless hands could theoretically be a bit dangerous—

“Yeah,” she grits out, swallowing thickly. “Mostly. Five out of ten.”

“An hour ago it was six out of ten,” he points out, brow wrinkling.

“Doesn’t matter. Where’s—?”

Her tongue catches. There are three of them when there should be four. Four of them, and they all have names, and the names are all there, in the back of her head, if she can only—

“Grandad?” Ryan ventures, still frowning. “Yeah, he’s—”

“Right here,” Grandad—but that’s not entirely right, is it— says, entering the front room from the hall. “Had to put my coat away.” He settles on the sofa beside her and grabs his own mug from the coffee table. The liquid in the mugs is not coffee. The liquid in the mugs has an entirely different chemical composition, she can see the organic makeup of it in her mind’s eye but the name of it, the _name_—

“You got what you needed, then,” Ryan says. “From that cafe, you got the readings.”

“Then this is real,” Yaz says, arms still crossed. There’s a braid hanging down her left shoulder, wisps of hair framing her face at the ears. “I don’t—I’ve had no missing persons reports.”

“Well, there wouldn’t be,” Ryan answers, glancing toward the Doctor uncertainly, even though he’s perfectly right. “This thing—whatever it is, ‘cos you still haven’t said—it eats people out of time. Right?”

“Yes,” she breathes. “Exactly.”

“Right, so. What is it? How do we stop it?”

“It’s an alien,” Yaz says quietly, gazing across at her. “Like you?”

It’s not an accusatory question at all, but it bites like one. She swallows back a flinch. “No,” she says firmly, but then the guilt slides in behind. “It’s—I don’t—”

Across, Ryan raises his eyebrows encouragingly. She scowls.

“It’s a creature,” she says, knuckles whitening around the watch, around the handle of her mug. “A weapon. I think. It doesn’t—it could have swallowed this whole galaxy by now if it wanted to, so I don’t—it’s not quite right and I don’t know why.”

“But you’ve run into it before,” Grandad—Greg—no, _Graham_, she’s _stupid_—says, a hint of impatience visible in the twist of his mouth. “But what I don’t understand is how it all fits together, Doc. I mean, ain’t it all an awful coincidence, that business with the temporal weapons and now some sort of time monster tearing through Sheffield streets, gobbling up passers-by?”

Yaz shifts. Her arms stay crossed.

“Could something have followed us, Doctor?” she asks, looking uncomfortable.

“_No_.” It’s instinctive, but it’s wrong, and by now she knows it. “It should be impossible,” she amends, swallowing queasily. Her hearts are beating sickeningly out of sync, one hammering in her throat, the other lagging sluggishly behind. “I don’t know—”

“Well, how do we stop it, then?”

“_I don’t know_,” she explodes, half-rising from the sofa, the world tilting. Graham reaches for her, but she dodges his grasp, standing unsteadily. The liquid in the mug sloshes as she moves. Her calf presses into the coffee table. She’s suddenly, horrifically, dreadfully cold. “I don’t know, but I’ll—”

“Woah,” Ryan starts, half-rising from the armchair himself. One hand bats absently in Yaz’s direction and she can’t tell if it’s reassurance or censure. “It’s alright.”

“Okay,” Yaz tries again, steadier. Her voice turns more firm, more gentle, the way it would with a civilian and it’s enough to make her nose wrinkle with irritation. “Okay. I’m confused, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Why don’t you start from the beginning?” Her eyes—big and brown and warm and dangerous—meet the Doctor’s own. “You don’t have to fix this by yourself.”

_You made me with your own hands_.

“I—” she tries. The blanket wrapped around her shoulders slides down to her elbows. She’s so _cold_. “There was a war,” she starts. The tip of her nose has gone numb. “A long time ago. Between my people and the—” She nearly swallows it all back, because it will make certain things more clear than she’d like. “The Daleks.”

Ryan leans back in the armchair with a sigh, a hand going to the bridge of his nose. “Right. Yep,” he says. “That tracks. Cheers, mate.”

“You never said.” Yaz shakes her head minutely, stepping forward a hair.

“It was a long time ago,” she snaps, and the adrenaline of it all has made the world gray at the edges, made one pulse race faster than the other. “So long ago it shouldn’t matter. Not anymore.”

She skids, and Graham is half reaching for an elbow, Ryan leaned forward in his chair once more. She swallows sickly and scowls away the assistance.

“The war was as big as the whole universe. Eventually, it became—never-ending. Never-beginning, for that matter. A war fought across time and space, and so we needed—weapons.”

“Temporal weapons,” Yaz breathes.

“Yes.” It scrapes the back of her throat to admit. “Things to eat away whole galaxies. Things to unwrite pieces of the universe so that we could win.” Her voice sounds almost dreamy to her own ears, and if she could stop it, she would. But there had been a certain elegance, a certain cosmic beauty in the horror she’d helped to unleash. She’ll never be a good enough man to deny it.

At the disgust in their faces, her breath comes sharper.

“We weren’t the only ones,” she says quickly, the justification sour in her ears. “That war birthed a thousand terrors that we had no hand in. The Could’ve Been King, the Cult of Skaro—”

“The Cult of Skaro.”

Graham’s voice stops her in her tracks. He isn’t looking at her any more.

“What about them?” she asks, numb with cold, the world dizzy and hot at the edges.

“Well,” he says, amicably. When he turns to her his eyes are an endless void of black. “I ate them, didn’t I?”

Consciousness returns so abruptly that she almost chokes on it, sputtering upwards, hearts pounding out of sync.

She buries her head in her knees, knuckles whitening in the quilt she’s still smothered under, shuddering. Time skids and quakes and it’s not so different from being asleep, really, and that thought squeezes more air from her lungs until her breaths are an embarrassing wheeze. She counts the seconds until she can grasp the right time from the air, but it’s all sand through her fingers. It’s only dark outside, and she doesn’t know what it means. It’s only dark in Graham’s front room, and she can barely stomach it. There’s the thought, irrational and childish and ancient, that all her problems might be solved by ducking her head back under the quilt until morning light.

She breathes shallowly into the darkness instead.

“Alright, Doc?” Graham peers round the door to the kitchen. Yellow light spills through, cracking open the silence. She can hear the crinkle of a biscuit wrapper, the distant clink of spoons. “We’re just in here. You were looking peaky, we thought you’d better nap.”

“Fine,” she breathes. “I—”

Her hands are shaking in her lap. She doesn’t have the watch. Without it, she’s floating in darkness.

“Sure you don’t want a longer rest?” he presses, brow crinkling.

“_No_.” Her hands curl into fists. “I—” She swallows painfully. “I just want to be awake,” she admits.

“Alright, fair enough,” he agrees, backing away. “Give us a minute, I’ll bring you more tea.”

She listens for the boil, empty in the watery silence. They’re not alone, this time, but for some reason Graham’s house is full of the same awful hollowness of before. Like there’s not enough that’s _real_ to fill up the space.

The mug of tea he presses into her hands is warm.

“Tea,” she says, surprising herself. “I remembered.”

“Right,” Graham says, uneasily, settling on the sofa beside her.

She smiles at him weakly. “I dreamt I forgot.”

“Did you?” He smiles back at her with the same air as before, like she’s only being humoured. “The thing is, Doc,” he says, looking to her warmly. The effect is watery in the dimness. “You’re dreaming right now.”

The mug tumbles from her hands to land on the carpet with a muffled thud. Graham’s eyes, so close, _too close_, fill slowly with black. Ink moves in to cover his irises. Yellow kitchen light reflects in them, sickly.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find you?” it asks, tilting Graham’s head playfully. “Did you think I wouldn’t tear apart whole galaxies to see you again?”

“_Wake up_,” she hears, against the frantic, uneven pounding of her own hearts. “_Wake up. Wake up _**_now_**_._”

The click of a lamp.

Light floods the front room and Yaz turns from it to face her, hair tumbling down her back.

“I’ve held it back,” Yaz says, only it’s not Yaz at all. Her eyes are like honey, trailing with unnatural light. “I'll protect him. Now, _run_.” 

That’s one order that she’s never refused. She peels herself from the sofa, shoeless, watchless, the quilt trailing behind her, tangling in her legs. She trips and rights herself, tears it away and tears herself towards the door, mindless. Shouts follow her, the pounding of feet against hardwood, but none of it registers. One moment is all but indistinguishable from the next. Second to second there’s only nothing and eternity as she runs, bare feet against wet pavement, into the empty night. Not empty yet, but it’s a concept that means nothing at all anymore.

Everything is happening and going to happen and already happened and it’s her fault, her fault, it’s her own hands—

Yaz had asked if something had followed them all back, and she’d been so close, but not quite right. It’s only her. It’s only her fault, it’s only something she made, and there’s no way to fix this but to run.

_If I leave_, she thinks, clarity slipping from her fingers, water in her hands. The last thought she’ll have that will matter, that will stick. _If I leave, it will follow_.

She drops jigsaw pieces as she runs. Corner by corner, block by block, there’s only so much of her to hold onto, breathed out ragged into the night. Her feet slap against puddles, elbows catching on people, dark, slick silhouettes in the night and the rain, deeper and deeper into a nameless city, away and towards her home.

She runs and runs and doesn’t stop, not even when a heart stumbles and stops, not even when her feet catch on uneven pavement, slimy bricks. She runs, following a map inside her head, and she doesn’t stop until she reaches what she’s running to.

It has a name, but she can’t remember it. And inside it would be warm and dry, but she can’t go in. She folds herself against it, hiding her face in blue-soaked wood and ozone, and a mournful sigh settles against the back of her mind.

_Barn in the desert_, it says, but she can’t remember what it means.

“How can I leave if I can’t go inside?” she asks it, but there’s only a moan and a creak in reply. “How can I leave when I don’t want to go?”

One heart thuds dull and alien inside her empty ribcage. The world is hot and aching and she can’t feel her hands.

_This is it_, she thinks, though it’s barely a thought at all. The inside of her head is all crumbs left behind. Unravelled thread. There’s nothing to anchor her to solid ground anymore. Seconds become seconds become seconds, and it’s just rain that doesn’t start and doesn’t end.

“I walk in eternity,” she insists, though at the moment it feels more like she’s falling through it. “I—”

She has nothing. There’s no name in her head and no place she can run. Only catastrophe, then and now, on the tips of her fingers.

“Doc.” A blur crouching in front of her. She peers through the rain and presses herself back against the blue. “Oh, my days. She said you’d run back here.”

“Who?” she croaks, flinching back as the shape reaches out, nameless fear flooding up her throat, behind her teeth.

“Yaz. Or—” The shape pauses. Its sleeve is soaked through with rain, the wool gleaming slickly in the dark. “Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t understand what’s happening, Doc.”

It’s just a shape, and she can’t hardly remember why she’s meant to be afraid of it, when it sounds so helpless.

“I don’t think you’re you,” she says.

“No, I am,” it insists. “I promise. I promise, I—” It presses closer, wincing, and his eyes are clear in the dim light, red-rimmed and afraid, and it jolts something in the back of her head, some instinct, some drive. “Look, see?” he begs. “She did something. She helped me. She—I don’t understand, Doc.”

“Graham,” she shudders, reaching for sense that won’t come without a fight. “S-something’s happening. Something bad, I can’t—”

“It’s alright,” he soothes, around the panic in his voice. He’s alone, and that’s wrong. He’s afraid, and that’s wrong too.

“It’s my fault.” She tries to right herself, but her arms fold underneath her, elbows trembling.

“No,” he says, “no, of course it’s not.”

“I have to _leave_,” she insists, still struggling.

“_No_,” he says, sharper. “For God’s sake, Doc. No more running.”

“I can’t—”

“Please,” he says. His hands reach for her, tentative, but she’s still pressed against the box, half-certain of something she can’t remember. She’s a swimmer in the dark. Rain pelts at her face, cold down her cheeks. Tears press embarrassing and hot behind her eyes.

“Something’s wrong,” she whispers, wilting against the blue, one heart sharp in her chest. “Something’s terribly wrong.”

“Let me help,” he tries. “The TARDIS—”

_Home_, she realizes. Blue sits warm like a song in her head, pleading.

“No,” she spits sharp. “I can’t. But I don’t understand. I’m meant to go, but I _can’t_.”

“Of course you can,” he says, hands still in front of him, and he doesn’t budge, even when she shakes her head, even when she presses herself further into the blue, even when the pressure behind her eyes spills hot onto her cheeks. “But you don’t have to.”

“I don’t know who you are,” she says, water soaking her hair, her face, pooling beneath her eyes. Eternity falling from the sky. “I don’t remember.”

His eyes are old and young and very afraid. “I’m your friend,” he says. “I’m your family. We all are.”

“What’s my name?” she begs, the whole world collapsing underneath. “Please—”

The grey shape—a man, a human, a friend, but the rest of it is all swallowed by an aching, hungry maw—clutches at her, presses her into his damp shoulder and it smells of wet wool and rain. His cold shaking hand grasps the back of her head, gentle.

The damp wool of his jumper scratches against her skin. He ran after her without a coat, and for some reason that’s important.

“I don’t know,” he admits, with a voice like breaking waves. “I don’t know your name.” His breath catches. His heart beats like a hummingbird against her cheek, so empty, but the sound of it puts reality into a straight line, pulses forward, forward, forward. A straight line into the dark.

But not alone.

“I’m not sure anyone does,” he whispers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the most important thing in life is to be yourself, and for me that means yeeting un-betaed things onto the internet late at night when no one's on after a few glasses of wine and i am OWNING IT
> 
> (but as a side note thank you very much for reading and I'd dearly love to know what you thought <3 )


	9. 9.

She’s not awake.

She’s not awake, but even in her dreams only one heart beats sullen, aching, a death knell. The gloom around her is only lit by a fiddly, ancient lamp set precariously on a bedside table, the streaky trickle of light pollution in from the window. This isn’t Graham’s front room. The unfamiliarity of it sets her teeth on edge, but the duvet is soft and clean and there are warm socks tugged over her freezing feet and—

And Yaz’s eyes are burning with unnatural warmth as a careful hand cards through her hair.

She’s propped up against too many pillows, starchy and unused. When she pushes herself up onher elbows, the thing that isn’t Yaz, wild-haired and deadly beautiful, drops its hand from her hair and rises to its feet. Unalarmed.

“What are you?’ she rasps, though it’s barely a question. She knows. Oh, she knows.

“I’m the bad wolf,” it breathes, using Yaz’s face like a mask as it frowns, contemplating. “Or maybe I’m the Moment.” It eyes her, amused. “Or maybe I’m both.”

“You can’t be here.” She leans back into the pillows as it sits on the bed, sinking in real and solid, but her head hits the wall. There’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. No way to escape as its hands, warm and calloused, wrap around her own. “You can’t.”

“I’m trying to protect you,” it says. “So is Yaz.”

“Get out of her,” she snarls, around the curl of her own lips. “_Get out_.”

“Your timeline has fractured. There’s fault lines,” and its fingers dance all the way up her forearm, to her elbow, absently playful, “runnin’ all the way across it. Up and down and sideways. They’re infected. That’s how I followed you.”

She jerks her arm away, pressing herself into the wall.

“This is a dream,” she insists, though by now, perhaps she knows better.

It frowns.

“Is it?”

“Stop,” she breathes, half-begging, “stop—stop playing, just stop it. Get out of her.”

“We have the same goal,” it presses, leaning closer. Its voice is smoother than Yaz’s, gentler. “We’re of the same mind. She’s let me in, whether she knows it or not. I won’t hurt her.”

“You’ll burn her up like a sun,” she protests.

“Why do you think we’re dreaming?” the bad wolf counters, gleaming with contradiction. “She’s safe like this.” It tilts Yaz’s head. “But you’re not.”

Her breath catches at the accusation. She shakes her head, voice cracking embarrassingly. “No. This can’t be real. It’s not—”

“I’m not the only thing that followed you,” it insists. “And you know it.”

“No!” It’s so childish she can hardly stand it, but there’s no point in being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes, there’s no point in growing up at all when time is just a circle, when your worst fears are only ever just ahead instead of just behind, when the fear that was supposed to make you kind has only cracked you open instead—

The bad wolf has no cause for sympathy, in the same way that a black hole doesn’t, in the same way that the smallest particle doesn’t. Its head only tilts, gold spilling from Yaz’s eyes.

“You know better than most,” it says softly, “that just because it’s a nightmare doesn’t mean it’s not real. You are _dying_.” It presses closer. “And when you die,” it breathes, “your timeline will finally crack open like an egg and hell will come spilling out into the universe. The Time War, unlocked, with you at the centre. The Nightmare Child and the Could’ve Been King and the Thing That Wasn’t and all the never-weres and should-have-beens. They’re already trying. What do you think has been eating people off the streets? They’re using your wound as a gateway. Bleeding themselves free into the universe.”

“That’s impossible,” she shudders.

The bad wolf only stares at her impassively.

“I see all,” it says mildly. “All of creation. All of time and space.”

Her lips feel dry and cracked. “Then how do I stop it?”

“There’s a room,” it breathes, using Yaz’s face, speaking with her lips, “in the TARDIS. Out of phase with reality, a separate dimension, cut off from the rest of the universe—”

Speaking to her with Yaz’s lips as though it’s speaking to a child, telling her things that she already knows, telling her things that she doesn’t want to hear.

“The zero room,” she says. “I know.”

There’s nothing of Yaz in its gaze at all, but it still tugs at something in the pit of her stomach. She’d _missed_ this, somehow, and the guilt eats away at her insides. She’d been so wrapped up in her own hurt, her own pain, that she hadn’t even noticed. So determined to keep the glass from shattering that when she _had_ finally cottoned on—

“Do you?” it asks.

“Don’t lecture me,” she tells it, without thinking. “You don’t understand, how could you _possibly_—”

It leans forward, suddenly, and Yaz’s lips are warm and dry against her own, and she tastes like time itself, and for just a moment she closes her eyes and leans in, before her better sense prevails.

“What was that for?” she demands, as she pulls away. It’s not _Yaz_. It’s only using her face, her lips, and the whole feel of it is—wrong, somehow.

The bad wolf smiles. It’s only very sad.

“Old times sake,” it says gently. “Goodbye, my Doctor.”

She wakes.

The watch is pressed into her hand. The same sallow room reveals itself as she cracks open her eyes, the same starchy pillows, the same yellow light streaky against the outside. Early morning, now, not the pitch of night.

At the hitch of her breath, Yaz lifts her head from where it was pillowed on her arms, red-eyed. For a moment, they only stare at each other.

“I was dreaming,” Yaz says, hoarse. Her hair still spills down her shoulders. She doesn’t look like herself, but she does. “Doctor. What’s my name?” she asks.

“Yasmin Khan,” she whispers, twitching a hand to grasp at those untamed curls, still an unnatural halo of hair. It’s like falling off the edge of a cliff, scraping down the sides. Everything inside her head is a thin treacle, and if she moves the wrong way it will all fall out her ears.

Yaz all but lunges at her, relieved, and it’s not very Yaz at all, except that if she thinks about it, of course it is. She smells of salt and damp and her hands are impossibly cold and her hair is impossibly soft as the Doctor grasps the back of her head instinctively.

“I’ve been so worried,” Yaz says, not letting go. “Doctor, please, what’s going on?”

This body isn’t good at close, it isn’t good at warmth, but there’s a part of her that still remembers how the whole thing works. When your friends are sad, when your friends are worried, when your friends are scared—you hold them. Because sometimes that’s the only thing you can do.

One heart pounds hollow, racing at the base of her neck. The watch ticks forward, forward, forward. Cold sweat blankets her forehead. One of her kidneys is about to fail.

“Yaz,” she whispers into her hair, because it’s about all the air she can manage. “I haven’t got much time.”

Yaz pulls away, frowning. “No, but,” she protests, a familiar worried line appearing in the middle of her forehead. “You’re alright, you—you remembered—”

But the words trail off as she looks, really _looks_. Dread seeps in behind her eyes.

“Doctor,” she says, and isn’t it funny that after all this, it still sounds betrayed to her ears. She’s committed the grave sin of being vulnerable, and they’ll never admit it, but they’ll also never forgive her for it.

Or maybe that’s not true. Yaz’s eyes are full of despair, but they’re determined, too.

“Outside,” the Doctor rasps, tucking the image of those eyes away, to examine later. “I need to see outside.”

“You can’t—”

“_Help me_,” she demands, and Yaz presses her lips together in a familiar, frustrated expression, but she helps her out of Graham’s guest room and down the stairs, cold hands at her elbow, wrapped around her waist. Forward, forward, forward, scratching like a record, seconds falling like marbles from a sack, heartbeat thudding lonely in her chest, and the sky when she stumbles outside—

“It’s happening,” she gasps, at the tree branches tearing in unnatural wind, at the poisonous clouds in the sky, at the twist and bend of reality at a breaking point.

“What’s happening?” Yaz demands over the howl, still white-knuckled around her elbow, hair lifted off her shoulders.

“Doc,” Graham says, joining them on the stairs, Ryan just behind. He struggles to close the door against the gale, and even as he pushes against it a potted plant is blown to his feet. It shatters. Dark soil spills out around his shoes.”What the hell is all this?”

Her knees collapse underneath her, and she tears herself from Yaz’s grasp, reaching for the railing. Her knuckles whiten around it, the watch still clutched desperately in her other hand. The ticking—the ticking—backwards and forwards and eternity in a second and above her, the sky will tear itself open, tear itself apart, rip itself to pieces in a thousand different ways, _consumed_—

“I did this,” she rasps, horror white and sharp in her stomach. “I brought it here, I’ve made the Earth the last battleground of the Time War.”

“No,” Yaz says, reaching for her, glancing away, glancing towards, never reaching at all, “no, of course you didn’t,” but Ryan steps around her, the only one with enough knowledge to be the right kind of scared. It’s glassy in his eyes, tight in the twist of his mouth.

“What does that mean?” he asks, and Graham works his way around beside him, stands in front of her to catch her if she falls, to grab her if she runs.

The thought is persistent, even still. _If I leave_, she thinks, half-begging, half-praying, _it will follow_.

“It’s my fault,” she shudders. “All of it. The ghosts—they’re mine. I thought—” she says, fumbling. “I thought if I could hide it from you, I could hide it from myself.” There’s pressure mounting behind her eyes. “I was trying to be someone different.” She swallows. “Someone better. Someone kinder.”

Her hand slips from the rail and she stumbles to the ground, ankle catching on a step.

“But I think—” she stutters, numbed. “I think I was better before. I think,” and the pressure turns to tears, hot and wrong and alien down her cheeks, “I think it was _part_ of what made me better, and I—”

“It’s alright, Doc,” Graham says, and a weathered hand slips under her head, cups the side of her face to lift her chin.

“I tried to run from it,” she whispers, looking him in the eye. “But there are some ghosts that we can’t get rid of, Graham. Sometimes we’re haunted for a reason.”

Behind them, the door that Ryan couldn’t close swings open. Grace’s house looms empty, watery dark against the flash-bang of the sky, the howling tear of the wind.

“I know,” he says, and Ryan takes his hand, and then her own, his fingers warm around Graham’s watch. Yaz takes her elbow. “I know.”

“You can fix this,” Yaz says, her voice soft, and it carries over the wind, somehow. A song sits at the back of her mind, but when she strains her neck to look, Yaz’s eyes are only warm and brown. They soften with something like understanding. “We can fix this,” she says. “If you tell us how.”

“This ain’t the end, Doc,” Graham says, the wind tearing at his hair, rippling in his jumper. “We’ve got far too much to do, yet.”

A thousand things could happen. A million. They do and they don’t and what’s right and what’s wrong are all a mix of potentialities, spiralling forward like light through the trees. If she tilts her head, all of it will come spilling out like treacle. If she runs, it will follow. If she runs, it might consume the Earth anyway. It hates her. It must hate her more than anything in the entire universe.

It still won’t win. Graham’s watch ticks desperately in her grip, froward, forward, forward.

“Doctor,” Ryan says. Wiser than he seems, always. “Let us help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YEET


	10. Epilogue.

_Thief_, she hears. _My silly thief_.

She dreams of a barn in the desert.

__

Time doesn’t pass in the zero room. Not in exactly the same way as it does outside, at least. It’s a bubble-wrapped pocket, tucked up against the real universe, and the vast emptiness, the free falling timelessness—they should be frightening.

Somehow, they’re not.

And it’s not a dreamless sleep, but it is a peaceful one.

__

Ryan’s in the middle of reading her the latest gossip column of some horrifyingly trashy magazine when she finally opens her eyes.

“Hold on,” she says, interrupting, blinking slowly against the warm light. “I thought Bianca was cheating on Eric, because he’d been texting Cheryl, who’d just broken up with Tony.”

“Yeah, but,” Ryan says, sprawled in a metal chair beside her. Without missing a beat, he flicks to the next page casually. “She’s givin’ him another go, see, ‘cos of this horoscope she got last week—”

She watches him blink, amused.

“Oh, my days,” he says, grinning wide, sitting up. “You’re alright. _Are_ you alright?” He squints, scrutinizing.

“Right as rain!” Though on second thought, she wanders lightly along her own timeline with a careful touch. Some parts are sore, scabbed. Some she hasn’t been able to touch since the war, and still can’t, still won’t. But she’s intact. All her threads are whole again, not eaten through, not half-ravaged anymore. She’s a frayed end, but no longer in danger of unraveling. Herself, or the universe. “Though I’m dying for a fried egg sandwich, I won’t lie.”

He shakes his head incredulously. “Well, _finally_. Better tell Grandad and Yaz.” A free hand dives into his pocket, reaching for his mobile, but he pauses as she scrunches her nose indignantly.

“_Finally_?”

“Been nearly a month, mate,” he points out, and once she looks past the teeth she can see the relief shining in his eyes. “Not that we were getting worried or nothing.” He puts the magazine down on the floor. “We were already worried, though, is the thing,” he says, while his face is still hidden. “Could you hear us, all this time?”

Tentative.

“Of course,” she says, smiling as his head raises back up. “I can always hear you. And not just when you’re readin’ me the gossip, although I did appreciate it.”

She’d appreciated it all. Ryan’s magazines, Yaz’s police reports, Graham’s romance novels. It hadn’t been consciousness, quite, but their voices had still broken through in quiet fragments. An anchor to the real. A ladder out, a rope to grasp.

Ryan stares at her quietly.

“You remember how we got here?” he asks, after a moment.

“No,” she admits, though there’s a screaming flash of the world on fire, seconds like falling marbles, everything failing, failing, failing. Her knees bashing against the stairs, Yaz’s knuckles white around her elbow, the zero room opening like a door into the coolest, calmest lake and then—nothing at all. “But I assume everything’s fine? Tell me there’s still a universe out that door, Ryan.”

“Just like you said.” His hands fidget in his lap. “Bit of—aftershocks, I guess. Weird sky. But once you were closed up in here, it all stopped. No more weird glowy business, either. Yaz is fine. Grandad, too, it all just—” He swallows. “Well, except for the people that got eaten. They’re gone, I think.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, but he waves it off, brow crinkled.

“Don’t be. You didn’t know, I don’t think. Not right away, anyway. You never did explain, y’know. What is this place? Feels—”

He frowns, searching for the right word and failing.

“Easier to think, in here,” he says finally. “I don’t feel as clumsy.”

“This room is cut off from the rest of the universe,” she explains, rising to her elbows with no effort at all, and the ease is exhilarating. She smiles, and sits all the way up, hands tangling together thoughtfully in her lap. Graham's watch falls from her loose grasp onto her thigh. “It’s not been contaminated with any other energies. It’s got its own sort of resonance. Well, I say resonance. Not exactly it, but the particles here vibrate at a slightly different frequency than our proper universe. Meant to help you heal, or think, or—hide, I suppose.”

“Proper weird,” he breathes, but the tone is admiring. He glances up at the ceiling, clean and white and stark. “Could use a trip to Ikea, though.”

“Used to have one that was decorated better,” she muses, though she’s never been overly fond of decorating. There’s a million better things to worry about, usually. Purple sofa aside, because that would just be cool. “Spent quite a bit of time in here, once upon a time. But I had to eject it during the war. The TARDIS made a new one, but to be honest by then I’d sort of forgotten about it.”

“Right.” Ryan’s fidgeting hands clasp together. As if to make up for the sudden lack of movement, his foot starts to tap nervously instead. “Doctor—”

But he trails off, gaze averting.

“You can ask,” she says gently.

“Do you want me to?”

At that, she stills.

“No,” she says honestly. “I’m a coward, Ryan. I meant what I said before. I spent so long becoming who I was that when I changed I didn’t want to give it up. I thought—if I could just _be_ that. Someone better, someone kinder, without—without everything I’d been before. New-new Doctor.” She smiles, even though the phrase won’t mean anything to him. “No strings attached. And it was working.” Her smile falters. She lets it, tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ears. It feels a bit greasy between her fingers. Bedraggled. “You lot, you just—came along. And you asked so many questions, but never the ones you should have, and it was so easy to just—”

She lets the hand fall limp into her lap.

“Just keep pretending,” she says quietly. “I was afraid that if you knew, if you _saw_, that you’d leave.” She swallows. “But that’s not fair. So, ask.”

For a moment, she watches him consider, hearts pounding. Reassuringly steady, fast in her throat. _A good man_, she thinks in a whisper. That’s all she’s ever tried to be, when she’s not too busy getting tangled up in herself. But being good and seeming good aren’t quite the same, and she’d known that from the start, really.

“Nah,” Ryan says abruptly, startling her. “Reckon you were mostly right, before. People don’t owe each other like that. Not really.” He leans back in his uncomfortable looking chair, feet crossing, hands clasping behind his head in contemplation. “We care about you.” His mouth presses together. “And I know you care about us. Nan used to say that when you really care about people, that’s it, really. You don’t ask for more than they can give.”

He takes a breath in, thinking in that careful, Ryan way of his, and places a hand hesitantly on her knee.

“Tell me anythin’,” he says. “Tell me anythin’, ‘cos we’re mates, and God knows I’ve told you just about everything I’ve ever thought. But only if you want.”

At her incredulous blink, he only shakes his head, amused.

“We’re friends,” he says simply. “And we all got ghosts. That’s just life, whether it’s life on Earth, or life on—Planet Zog, or wherever it is you’re from.” Her grins at her indignant scoff. “But we gotta trust each other. And I do. Trust you.”

He looks at her, forward, forward, forward. So young she can barely fathom it.

“Do you trust us, Doctor?” he asks, sincere.

She could still run, probably. Try again. Keep trying, until she gets it right.

She takes a deep breath and flops back against the thin pillow of her cot, arms folding behind her head. She smiles.

“In the constellation of Kasterborous,” she begins softly, “there was a planet called Gallifrey…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> c'est fini!
> 
> real bold of me to assume I was gonna have finished this by the end of october, but we stan some lofty goals lmao - at least I got to it before the new series started? speaking of which TRAILER SATURDAY WHO ELSE IS DYING BC I
> 
> literally can't handle the excitement, ANYWAY
> 
> Thank you very much for reading and I'd love to know what you thought! 
> 
> catch y'all later
> 
> \- W


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